Serious World Politics - Slavery, Concentration Camps, Genocide

Chemical Attacks in Syria 2018

noreply@blogger.com (Karen S. Cole) — Mon, 09 Apr 2018 00:08:00 +0000

Burning Eyes, Foaming Mouths: Years of Suspected Chemical Attacks in Syria

THE NEW YORK TIMES

By YONETTE JOSEPH and CHRISTINA CARON

April 8, 2018

Nearly five years after the government of President Bashar al-Assad agreed to purge Syria’s chemical weapons stockpile, the chemical warfare shows no sign of ending as Syria’s bloody civil war stretches into its seventh year.
The suspected chemical attack on a Syrian rebel stronghold near Damascus on Saturday was the latest in a string of similar deadly assaults, including one in 2013 that killed more than 1,400 and shocked the world’s conscience.
John Kerry, then secretary of state, called it a “moral obscenity.”
Analysts have said that the use of poison gas, a war crime under international law, is integral to Mr. Assad’s scorched-earth drive to regain control of the rebel-held areas near Damascus.
Sign Up For the Morning Briefing Newsletter
Here is a look at some of the major episodes of suspected chemical attacks.
August 2013: Sarin
The attacks in Syria began with blasts in the night. Some residents who heard the explosions and lived to tell about them described the sound like “a water tank bursting.”
“Then came the smell, which burned eyes and throats, like onions or chlorine,” The New York Times wrote at the time.
Opposition groups said rockets carrying chemical weapons hit the towns of Ain Tarma, Zamalka, Jobar and Muadamiya. Videos and photos posted online showed hundreds of bodies without visible wounds. Many victims exhibited symptoms like vomiting, intense salivating, suffocation and tremors. The chemicals were believed to be a “cocktail” of the toxic nerve agent sarin and other components.
Opposition activists also posted photos of rockets they said were used in the attack. The deadliest toll fell on the heart of Eastern Ghouta.
When the enormity of the attacks became clearer to the administration of President Barack Obama, Mr. Kerry accused the Syrian government of the “indiscriminate slaughter of civilians” and of cynical efforts to cover up its responsibility for a “cowardly crime.”
The attack spurred Mr. Obama to ask Congress for permission to launch a military counterattack. It also emerged as a test of Mr. Obama’s willingness to hold to his stance that a chemical attack would cross a “red line.”
In 2012, he stated at an impromptu news conference at the White House:
“We cannot have a situation where chemical or biological weapons are falling into the hands of the wrong people. We have been very clear to the Assad regime but also to other players on the ground that a red line for us is we start seeing a whole bunch of weapons moving around or being utilized.”
But in 2013, as he drew criticism for not taking more decisive action on Syria after the suspected chemical attacks, Mr. Obama said while on a trip to Stockholm: “I didn’t set a red line. The world set a red line.”
In September, the United States and Russia reached an agreement that called for Syria’s arsenal of chemical weapons to be removed or destroyed by the middle of 2014.
April 2014: Poison Gas
An attack in the village of Kfar Zeita sent streams of choking patients to hospital, and Syrian state television and antigovernment activists said that poison gas had been used in the rebel-held village in the central province of Hama.
According to opposition activists, government helicopters dropped improvised bombs on the village, covering it with a thick smoke that smelled of chlorine. Syrian state television blamed the Nusra Front, Al Qaeda’s affiliate in Syria, for the attack.
The Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, said in a statement in September 2014 that it had collected evidence that chlorine had been used as a weapon, “systematically and repeatedly,” in three villages in northern Syria in April. A United Nations report also said chlorine attacks had taken place in April and May.
May 2015: Chlorine
In spring of 2015, two years after Mr. Assad agreed to dismantle Syria’s chemical weapons stockpile, the smell of bleach hit the Syrian town of Sarmeen, making it difficult for residents to breathe.
That May, rescue workers began raising the alarm: There was growing evidence that the government was flouting international law to drop jerry-built chlorine bombs on insurgent-held areas.
The chemical is typically dropped in barrel bombs that explode on impact, distributing clouds of gas. The gas injures the respiratory tract, and, in some cases, can cause victims to choke to death as the lungs fill with fluid.
Hatem Abu Marwan, then 29, a rescue worker with the White Helmets civil defense organization, told The Times in 2015: “We know the sound of a helicopter that goes to a low height and drops a barrel. Nobody has aircraft except the regime.”
The United Nations Security Council discussed a draft resolution that would create a panel, reporting to the secretary general, to determine which of the warring parties was responsible for using chlorine as a weapon. But Syrian state media dismissed it all as propaganda.
August 2015: Mustard Gas
Later that year, in August, the Syrian American Medical Society, a humanitarian group, said it had received more than 50 patients, 23 of whom showed symptoms of chemical exposure.
Some had blisters associated with mustard gas after an attack in the city of Marea. A United Nations report blamed the Islamic State.
September 2016: Chlorine
Another attack in 2016 killed at least two people when barrels containing chlorine gas were dropped over a rebel-held section of Aleppo.
Using chlorine as a weapon is forbidden, but it was not included in the eradication of Syria’s chemical weapons because it also has many civilian uses.
April 2017: Sarin
Almost exactly one year ago, dozens of people, including children, died on April 4, 2017, in Khan Sheikhoun, in northern Syria, and hundreds more were injured in what was described as the worst chemical attack in years.
This time, the doctors and rescue workers suspected something beyond chlorine gas. Soon after, the Turkish health minister confirmed a preliminary report that the nerve agent sarin had been found in the blood and urine of victims who were evacuated to Turkey.
In response, President Trump ordered a military strike that fired 59 Tomahawk missiles at the Al Shayrat airfield, where the chemical weapons attack had originated.
President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia expressed doubt that the attack had happened and said it wasn’t the Syrian government that possessed the chemical weapons — it was the insurgents fighting Mr. Assad’s forces. The White House accused Russia of engaging in a cover-up.
April 2018: ‘Chemical Agent’
In the latest episode of violence, dozens of Syrians were killed in a suspected chemical attack in the rebel-held suburb of Douma, aid groups said on Sunday.
The Syrian Civil Defense and the Syrian American Medical Society said in a joint report that more than 500 people had gone to medical centers after the assault “with symptoms indicative of exposure to a chemical agent.” Symptoms included including trouble breathing, foaming at the mouth, burning eyes and the “emission of a chlorine-like odor.”
The attack could not be independently verified, but rescue workers reported that at least 49 people had died. Video footage circulated by anti-government activists showed the bodies of men, women and children sprawled on floors.

Abolish Sexual Slavery

noreply@blogger.com (Karen S. Cole) — Fri, 16 Feb 2018 12:50:00 +0000

Human Trafficking and Sex Slavery in North Carolina

Sixty-some degrees and overcast on a typical morning–I was taking no notice of the traffic lines as I sped through the empty half of the Walmart parking lot trying to beat the lunch crowd to my favorite spot. Suddenly, I noticed a teenage girl stumbling out of a parked car.
She stood out, with disheveled hair, legs as thin as my wrists covered by thin black leggings, an oversized baggy sweatshirt, no shoes, no purse, no wallet, no depth behind her eyes. I stared as she passed in front of my car before climbing in the passenger seat of another vehicle and riding off.
My female instincts kicked in, and I knew in my gut that she wasn’t just another homeless girl living out of her car. I slowly drove past the car that she had gotten out of and noticed a man in the reclined driver’s seat. The thoughts running rampant in my head were so unnerving and nauseating that I actually had to pull my car across two spaces, roll the window down, and put my head between my legs.
She was a modern day slave.
When I snapped out of my episode I realized that the car had gone one way, the girl another, and both left me thinking: How is this happening in my own backyard? And even worse: How have I been so naive, so under- informed that I’m in this state of shock?

We need to peel back our sunglasses, rub our eyes, and look at the reality of this situation: Trafficking and exploitation are a very real disease that has infected the neighborhoods we call home. Don’t kid yourself. This isn’t just an overseas issue. It happens right here in North Carolina. Right here in Raleigh. It’s modern day slavery.

Words we should know:

Exploitation

When vulnerable people are taken advantage of; can be in the form of labor or sexual abuse; minors being used in labor or sexual acts are ALWAYS considered exploited because anyone under the age of 18 is considered vulnerable, as well as the mentally handicapped and anyone who is from a foreign country and can therefore not fully understand the native language or culture/laws.

An example of labor exploitation is hiring someone who doesn’t speak English to clean your house at a rate less than minimum wage. They don’t understand that it’s illegal and are thus at a disadvantage. Engaging in sexual acts with a minor or someone who is mentally handicapped is considered sexual exploitation because regardless of their consent, they’re vulnerable and therefore at a disadvantage.

Trafficking

When someone is exploited for the purpose of financial gain and/or by the use of force, fraud, or coercion.
Force involves physical restraint, beatings, rape, and confinement
Fraud includes false promises, posing as a false agency or employer, and lying about living or working conditions
Coercion involves threats or blackmail, confiscation of passport or other legal documents, and making a person afraid to contact authorities or family.

An example of trafficking would be when a young girl is being bounced between foster homes and a neighbor offers take her under his wing and give her a nice home in exchange for working for him. She is locked up, beaten, raped, and told that if she seeks help she will be shamed by society. In that scenario the victim has been trafficked by fraud, force, and coercion, respectively.

Modern Day Slavery

This is the exact same thing as trafficking except there is always financial gain involved. Imagine the same example as above, except the neighbor is making her have sex with strangers in exchange for money.

Now that we’ve covered the basics I can share some interesting statistics with you.

According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, it’s estimated that in 2006 there were 2.4 million people worldwide being trafficked in what was estimated to be a $32 billion a year industry. That same year, UNICEF estimated 2 million of those to be children.

What does any of this have to do with you, a proud North Carolinian? In 2012 the National Human Trafficking Resource Center reported that there were 512 calls reporting possible human trafficking in North Carolina alone–46 of those from Raleigh, 7 from Cary, 14 from Durham, and 99 from Charlotte. All due to the network of highways, military bases, large agricultural and meat packing industries, growing immigrant population, and the fact that we’re a coastal state.

These high numbers put North Carolina in the top ten for human trafficking in the United States.

This is a top ten I don’t want to be a part of.

My point of even writing about this topic is to at the very least inform. I know “inform” can be a scary word because you feel like once you’re informed you’re required to take action, right? Wrong. Just being informed will make you want to take action. You don’t have to start waking up early on your Saturdays off to visit rehabilitation homes and help young girls get back on track. Although if you want to, check this out: http://www.transforminghopeministries.org/

And you don’t have to start seeking out females in an effort to find which may be exhibiting signs of being in a trafficking situation. Although here are some tips for spotting it: http://www.polarisproject.org/human-trafficking/recognizing-the-signs

But what you ought to do is be informed and share your knowledge with others when the opportunity arises. Unfortunately, many victims don’t realize they’re victims and it may take a little (*dun dun dunnn*) information to help them realize that they are in fact being exploited by or trafficked by someone that they think cares about them.

It’s also an opportunity to lead by example. Showing your children, neighbors, co-workers, and/or strangers what it looks like to be in a healthy relationship–No need for ridiculous amounts of PDA, but speaking kindly of and being slightly affectionate towards your significant other can go a long ways in the eyes of the young and impressionable that are always watching.

These recent arrests made by the FBI have brought us to this undeniable realization that this is happening all over the world–and very close to home. All I ask is that as citizens of North Carolina, the United States, and essentially the world, we at least inform ourselves. I guess at this stage in the game we should all have something we bring to the metaphoric table of life–if you can’t think of any specific skill set or talent then at least allow it to be knowledge.

Dana

Dana is a passionate champion in the fight for awareness of human trafficking, with special focus to our own state of North Carolina, which holds the dubious position of ranking 10th in the nation for this scourge. All my articles.

Google: GHOST WRITER INC for your Ghost Writing, Ghostwriting or Editing book, screenplay, music, freelance and contracted copy writing, and all of your writing related needs. Ghost Writer, Inc. also has top level marketers, promoters, and publishing or optioning assistance services. Visit www.rainbowriting.com (only one "w") as soon as you're done with this blog, if you are serious about your worthwhile project. We will consider doing work for non-profit organizations, if you can get a grant for ghostwriting or editing a book project, or something along those lines. Thank you for your valuable time.

Why was the Holocaust a Secret?

noreply@blogger.com (Karen S. Cole) — Fri, 09 Feb 2018 12:17:00 +0000

Up in smoke goes the lie that the Holocaust was a big secret

What We Knew - Lie about Rape. It's such a secret. That way, Murder is okay.

May 12, 2006

A Jewess who ghostwrites. Maybe that is why the Holocaust happened. Weird!

What We Knew is a remarkable study based on more than a decade of research, combining oral history and systematic survey techniques. The first and second sections consist of interviews with German Jewish survivors and "ordinary Germans" respectively. The third and fourth parts present evidence from written surveys conducted among larger sample groups of Jewish and non-Jewish Germans who lived through the Nazi era.

The authors state that, taken together, their interviews and surveys make up "a representative sample of Jews and non-Jews who had lived through the Third Reich", with the caveat that they represent a somewhat younger population than had been the average in Germany between 1933 and 1945. The result is a book that throws light not only on everyday life during the Third Reich, but also specifically on what people knew about the Final Solution, the mass murder of European Jewry.

This book will be useful to students and scholars of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust, and it is also likely to appeal to a wider readership of those interested in these aspects of history.

The survey and interview evidence presented in What We Knew underlines the recent trend in research on Nazi society that emphasises consensus for the Nazi regime among much of the German population. Eric Johnson and Karl-Heinz Reuband contend that the majority of Germans "supported Hitler and many aspects of Nazi ideology", although they did not necessarily endorse all aspects of the regime. This book also emphasises that most Germans did not live in constant fear or dread during the Third Reich. The majority carried on with their normal lives. In contrast to much of the earlier historical literature on the subject, the survey evidence presented in this book shows that the fear of being arrested by the Gestapo did not feature in the daily experience of most Germans. They knew that if they broadly consented to the National Socialist system they would not be punished. The Nazi terror apparatus was aimed at specific groups, such as the Jews and political opponents of the regime.

The Jewish survivors' testimonies detail the experiences of Jews who departed from Germany beforeKristallnacht , those who left Germany after that momentous event, those who were deported during the war and those who went into hiding. They describe their lives in Germany both before and during the early years of the Nazi regime. They depict the escalation of anti-Semitism during the Nazi era and their disillusionment with the reactions of the majority of their German compatriots. They tell of the events of Kristallnacht and its aftermath, their attempts to leave Germany, their experiences in concentration camps, their deportations and their experiences in hiding during the war.

While one interviewee, William Benson, is adamant that "you never forgive, you never forget", other Jewish survivors make the point that not all Germans were "bad". Margarete Leib states that "you can't lump everybody together", and Henry Singer, whose sister survived because she was hidden by a German family until the end of the war, declares that "it's not fair to accuse all of them". Jewish survivors also highlight distinctions about the amount of anti-Semitism in different cities or regions. Karl Meyer, for example, contends that there was not the same anti-Semitism in Cologne or Hamburg as in other areas, but that in Munich "they were rabid anti-Semites".

Ernst Levin, who was deported from Breslau to Auschwitz in January 1943, states that the Germans "knew that the Jews were vanishing" as city after city was declared judenrein (free of Jews). Herbert Klein, who was deported from Nuremberg to Theresienstadt in June 1943, also asserts that "certain things must have been known". Both say that Germans who claim they never knew or heard anything are lying. Hannelore Mahler, who was deported from Krefeld in September 1944, recounts how the Jews of Krefeld were rounded up and marched past the church just as people were leaving after Sunday Mass. "They had to have seen us," he says.

Many of the interviews with "ordinary Germans" point to the same conclusion. They talk about their everyday lives in Nazi Germany and the extent to which they knew about or heard about mass murder. The testimonies span from those Germans who admit to knowing nothing to those who describe witnessing and even participating in mass murder. With specific regard to the death camps, some Germans reveal partial knowledge, while others say they knew nothing at all about them. Herbert Lutz says of the mass shootings and the gassings: "People just did not want to believe it." This suggests that these atrocities were talked about. Hiltrud Kuhnel confirms not only that the camps were talked about, but also that people knew that they were extermination camps. He says: "You knew that was what they were.

Hence, if someone says today that he had never known that, it is absolutely not true." Adam Grolsch provides an account of the slaughter of 25,000 Jewish men, women and children, carried out "in the most beastly way" at Pinsk in October 1942. It is a chilling eyewitness narrative of mass murder. Ruth Hildebrand affirms that people heard about the mass murder and describes how information about events in Poland and the Soviet Union filtered into Germany because "the soldiers on leave... did a lot of talking". Ernst Walters declares "they're lying" about the statement by Germans that nobody talked about it.

Walter Sanders states that, with the escalation of anti-Semitic propaganda and agitation, "when the Jews were deported, we knew that something was going to happen to them". He was a communications officer on the Russian front, and he describes the atrocities he witnessed and recounted to relatives and friends when he came home on leave during the war. He concludes: "A large part of the population did know about it... They knew that there were concentration camps. They knew that Jews were kept there. Later word got around that they were gassed. It wasn't for nothing that it was said in those years: 'Take care, otherwise you'll go up the chimney.' That was a familiar figure of speech. It circulated everywhere in Germany."

Interestingly, the authors disagree on how widespread knowledge of the Holocaust was among the German population. Reuband believes one third of the population knew about the mass murder of the Jews, while Johnson estimates that half of the German population did. Their disagreement on this is based on their different interpretations about the age group surveyed. Johnson argues that Reuband's estimate is too low because two thirds of the sample group were still teenagers when the war broke out and the older survey respondents were much more aware of the mass murder at the time than the younger ones. Regardless of the discrepancy between their estimates, Reuband and Johnson concur and conclude that it is nevertheless clear that "the mass murder of the European Jews was no secret to millions of German citizens while it was still being carried out".

Lisa Pine is senior lecturer in history, London South Bank University.

What We Knew: Terror, Mass Murder and Everyday Life in Nazi Germany

Author - Eric Johnson and Karl-Heinz Reuband
Publisher - John Murray
Pages - 434
Price - £9.99
ISBN - 0 7195 6184 1

The real reason for the Holocaust and this blog is so that somebody can write a term paper and get ahead. no joke. But the best road is to end Genocide forever, always.

Google: GHOST WRITER INC for your Ghost Writing, Ghostwriting or Editing book, screenplay, music, freelance and contracted copy writing, and all of your writing related needs. Ghost Writer, Inc. also has top level marketers, promoters, and publishing or optioning assistance services. Visit www.rainbowriting.com (only one "w") as soon as you're done with this blog, if you are serious about your worthwhile project. We will consider doing work for non-profit organizations, if we can get a grant for ghostwriting or editing a book project, or something along those lines. Thank you for your valuable time.

The Lemkin Summit to End Genocide and Mass Atrocities

noreply@blogger.com (Karen S. Cole) — Wed, 03 Jan 2018 05:17:00 +0000

Lemkin Summit to End Genocide and Mass Atrocities 2018

Posted by Enough Team on September 18, 2017

February 10, 2018 – February 12, 2018

Join the Enough Project and Jewish World Watch for The Lemkin Summit to End Genocide and Mass Atrocities, this year’s 3-Day conference bringing students and community leaders at the forefront of the anti-atrocity movement to D.C. for a weekend of learning and action. Together, we will hear from expert panels and guest speakers on topics including:
U.S. government tools for preventing and responding to genocide and mass atrocities
Financial tools to counter the nexus of conflict and corruption
The current dynamics in various conflicts areas
Strategies for making a difference when you return home

Participants will network with one another, receive advocacy training, and learn how to leverage their networks to engage their communities and policymakers in taking action. The conference will culminate in a lobby day on Capitol Hill.

The Lemkin Summit is named in honor of Raphael Lemkin, a Polish-Jewish lawyer who was an ardent activist and tireless defender of human rights. Lemkin coined the term “genocide” in 1944, lobbied the UN for genocide to be added to international law, and participated in the drafting of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.

When:
Saturday February 10 - 11am-9:00pm, American University
Sunday February 11 - 9am-9pm; American University
Monday February 12 - 9am-5pm; Capitol Hill

* Participants are expected to attend the full conference.

Cost: Registration Fee covers training, materials, and most meals; accommodations are not included.
Regular rate: $150
Student and Young Professional (under 25) rate: $50

Travel/Accommodations: A limited amount of travel stipends will be available to students coming from outside D.C. to subsidize their travel costs. To apply for a travel stipend, please indicate your interest in the application below.

Accepted applicants will be notified by early December.

Click here to apply now!

Genocide in Burma: The Burma Act of 2017

noreply@blogger.com (Karen S. Cole) — Thu, 30 Nov 2017 20:57:00 +0000

Tell Congress: Pass the Burma Act of 2017

The petition to Congress reads:
"Do everything in your power to stop the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya people. Pass the Burma Act of 2017. "

Dear Karen,

Since late August, the Burmese military has been executing a horrific, systematic ethnic cleansing campaign, using brutality, rape and murder, against the Rohingya people – a Muslim minority in the Buddhist-majority country. Over 604,000 refugees have poured into neighboring Bangladesh to flee the violence.¹
The United States has a long history of engagement in Burma – it was only last year that the U.S. fully lifted the sweeping, decades-old economic sanctions against the military regime.² The sanctions were an imperfect but by-and-large successful effort by the U.S. and the international community to pressure Burma to make democratic reforms. From 2011 to 2016, the United States engaged in the process of reducing and ultimately removing sanctions both as part of a geopolitical strategy against China and to capitalize on the new markets made possible by improved trade relations with Burma.
The progress that Burma has made over the past several decades is due in large part to economic sanctions – we know they work. In this moment of crisis for the Rohingya people, it would be inhumane and unacceptable for Congress to stand idly by. A bipartisan group of lawmakers have recently introduced legislation to address this atrocity, but it needs more support to move forward.

Tell Congress: Do everything you can to stop the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya people. Pass the Burma Act of 2017. Click here to sign the petition.

The Burma Act of 2017 would hit top officials in the military government in the only way that they will understand – through aggressive sanctions that will hit their pocketbooks. We must build grassroots support for this crucial legislation now.
Recently, the U.S. Holocaust Museum released a report verifying that the Burmese Army is marching toward committing genocide against the Rohingya people.³ The Burma Act of 2017 would impose financial sanctions and visa bans on senior military officials in Burma. This means that U.S. banks and other financial institutions would be barred from holding their blood money, their children would be prohibited from attending U.S. colleges, and it would stop the U.S. military from providing security assistance to these war criminals.⁴
The Muslim Rohingya have long been hated in a majority-Buddhist country, with conflict going back decades to the two groups fighting on different sides of World War II. At the end of August, a handful of Rohingya militants mounted an attack, and the Burmese army has responded with a systematic campaign of murder that experts describe a “textbook example” of ethnic cleansing. More than 288 villages have been burned, and bodies are still washing up on the shore of the Bay of Bengal.⁵
Yet still, many in Myanmar insist nothing is going on – or it is somehow deserved. In the face of such attitudes, Congress’s failure to take action is unacceptable.

Tell Congress: Do everything you can to stop the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya people. Pass the Burma Act of 2017. Click here to sign the petition.

At this pivotal moment, our leaders have a choice: respond decisively to one of the most pressing humanitarian crises in the world today by standing with those fleeing persecution and violence or turn their backs and be judged by history. We need to put pressure on Congress now to make sure they make the right choice.

Tell Congress: Do everything you can to stop the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya people. Pass the Burma Act of 2017. Click the link below to sign the petition:
https://act.credoaction.com/sign/Pass_Burma_Sanctions_2017?t=8&akid=26208%2E9771974%2ETPDRIs

Thank you for standing against genocide,
Tessa Levine, Campaign Manager
CREDO Action from Working Assets

Add your name:

References:

Bethany Hines, “Rohingya refugees need your help,” CNN, Nov. 13, 2017.
Nyshka Chandran, “US considers slapping sanctions back on Myanmar a year after removing them,” CNBC, Oct. 24, 2017.
Poppy McPherson,“US Holocaust Museum says evidence of genocide against Rohingya in Myanmar,” The Guardian, Nov. 14, 2017.
Leigh Ann Caldwell and Abigail Williams, “Senators Propose Sanctions on Myanmar but Path Forward Rests With McConnell,” NBC News, Nov. 2, 2017.
Hannah Beech, “Across Myanmar, Denial of Ethnic Cleansing and Loathing of Rohingya,” The New York Times, Oct. 24, 2017.
Ibid.

Google: GHOST WRITER INC for your Ghost Writing, Ghostwriting or Editing book, screenplay, music, freelance and contracted copy writing, and all of your writing related needs. Ghost Writer, Inc. also has top level marketers, promoters, and publishing or optioning assistance services. Visit www.rainbowriting.com (only one "w") as soon as you're done with this blog, if you are serious about your worthwhile project. We will consider doing work for non-profit organizations, if we can get a grant for ghostwriting or editing a book project, or something along those lines. Thank you for your valuable time.

Petition to Members of the Norwegian Nobel Committee

noreply@blogger.com (Karen S. Cole) — Thu, 16 Nov 2017 02:00:00 +0000

Tell the Nobel Committee: Pressure Peace laureate Aung San Suu Kyi to stop genocide

Even as you read this, Burmese government soldiers are perpetrating a genocide on the Rohingya – a Muslim minority in Buddhist-majority Myanmar, also known as Burma – including horrors sickening even to imagine:

"Survivors said they saw government soldiers stabbing babies, cutting off boys’ heads, gang-raping girls, shooting 40-millimeter grenades into houses, burning entire families to death, and rounding up dozens of unarmed male villagers and summarily executing them."1

Former activist and Nobel Peace laureate Aung San Suu Kyi is now the most senior non-military leader of Myanmar. But she has refused to use her stature to stop these atrocities, even reportedly referring to genocide as “a quarrel” in a recent visit to the area.2 One U.N. human rights expert calls her silence “baffling.”3

One of the few international bodies that might have influence over Suu Kyi is the Nobel Committee that once awarded her the Nobel Peace Prize – so we need to pressure them to speak up immediately in order to stop the violence.

Tell the Nobel Committee: Pressure Peace laureate to stop genocide.

In one stomach-churning account, a Rohingya woman described how Burmese government soldiers threw her child into a fire, then proceeded to rape her and murder her sisters, brother, and mother.4

The Muslim Rohingya have long been hated in a majority-Buddhist country, with conflict going back decades to the two groups fighting on different sides of World War II. At the end of August, a handful of Rohingya militants mounted an attack and the Burmese army has responded with a systematic campaign of murder that experts describe a “textbook example” of ethnic cleansing. More than 288 villages have been burned, and bodies are still washing up on the shore of the Bay of Bengal.6

Yet still, many in Myanmar insist nothing is going on – or it is somehow deserved.6 In the face of such attitudes, Aung San Suu Kyi's failure to loudly condemn the military violence is aiding and abetting horrific crimes.

Yanghee Lee, the U.N. special rapporteur on human rights in Myanmar, insists that “If Aung San Suu Kyi were instead to reach out to the people and say, ‘Hey, let’s show some humanity,’ I think people will follow her — she’s adored by the public.”7 Instead, Suu Kyi has supported the army’s stance and told the world that “no one can fully understand the situation of our country the way we do.”8

Tell the Nobel Committee: Pressure Peace laureate to stop genocide.

Aung San Suu Kyi won the Nobel Peace Prize for her opposition to the repressive military junta that has ruled Myanmar for far too long. Even after her party swept into office with promises of reform, the military has continued to try to limit her power. Still, as human rights experts note, she has immense popularity and the ability to speak out – and with a Nobel prize in her pocket, she has even greater responsibility to do so.

Unlike Donald Trump, the Nobel Committee has enough moral credibility that it seems possible they might intervene. Despite the committee’s insistence that they are no longer involved once they award a prize, Suu Kyi’s failure to speak out against this violence is tarnishing the Nobel Committee’s reputation in a way that might force them to respond.9 We need to make it clear to the Nobel Committee that they must do everything in their power to publicly pressure Suu Kyi – and help stop these atrocities.

Tell the Nobel Committee: Pressure Peace laureate to stop genocide.

Thank you for speaking out.

References:

1. Jeffrey Gettleman, “Rohingya Recount Atrocities: ‘They Threw My Baby Into a Fire,’” The New York Times, Oct. 11, 2017.
2. Oliver Holmes, “Aung San Suu Kyi makes first visit to site of anti-Rohingya violence,” The Guardian, Nov. 2, 2017.
3. Laignee Barron, “A U.N. Rights Expert Is 'Baffled' by Aung San Suu Kyi’s Seeming Indifference to the Rohingya,” Time, Oct. 27, 2017.
4. Gettleman, “Rohingya Recount Atrocities: ‘They Threw My Baby Into a Fire.’”
5. Ibid.
6. Hannah Beech, “Across Myanmar, Denial of Ethnic Cleansing and Loathing of Rohingya,” The New York Times, Oct. 24, 2017.
7. Gettleman, “Rohingya Recount Atrocities: ‘They Threw My Baby Into a Fire.’”
8. Holmes, “Aung San Suu Kyi makes first visit to site of anti-Rohingya violence.”
9. Russell Goldman, “Why Aung San Suu Kyi’s Nobel Peace Prize Won’t Be Revoked,” The New York Times, Sept. 4, 2017.

PETITION BY CREDO ACTION:

home
terms of use
privacy
contact

CREDO Action is a publication of Working Assets | credomobile.com

Google GHOST WRITER INC for your Ghost Writing, Ghostwriting or Editing book, screenplay, music, freelance and contracted copy writing, and all of your writing related needs. Ghost Writer, Inc. also has top level marketers, promoters, and publishing or optioning assistance services. Visit www.rainbowriting.com (only one "w") as soon as you're done with this blog, if you are serious about your worthwhile project. We will consider doing work for non-profit organizations, if we can get a grant for ghostwriting or editing a book project, or something along those lines. Thank you for your valuable time.

Fight Genocide like Fridtjof Nansen

noreply@blogger.com (Karen S. Cole) — Tue, 10 Oct 2017 16:00:00 +0000

How do you Fight Genocide in your times, as one person, in 2017 or 2018?

By a Book Ghost Writer for the Nobel Prize Committee @ Nobelprize.org

The Nobel Peace Prize 1922

Fridtjof Nansen

I did once, in a Black neighborhood. You can, too. If you read this, fight genocide with all your might. Now read about this man, who outdid me and went further - earlier!
It means maybe YOU can outdo him and me combined. Okay?

Fridtjof Nansen (October 10, 1861-May 13, 1930) was born at Store Frøen, near Oslo. His father, a prosperous lawyer, was a religious man with a clear conception of personal duty and moral principle. His mother was a strong-minded, athletic woman who introduced her children to outdoor life and encouraged them to develop physical skills. And Nansen's athletic prowess was to prove of the utmost importance to his career.

He became expert in skating, tumbling, and swimming, but it was his expertise in skiing that was to play such a large role in his life. Not massively built, Nansen was tall, supple, strong, hard. He possessed the physical endurance to ski fifty miles in a day and the psychological self-reliance to embark on long trips, with a minimum of gear and only his dog for company.

In school Nansen excelled in the sciences and in drawing and, upon entering the University of Oslo in 1881, decided to major in zoology. In the next fifteen years he united his athletic ability, his scientific interests, his yearning for adventure, and even his talent for drawing in a series of brilliant achievements that brought him international fame.

In 1882 he shipped on the sealer Viking to the east coast of Greenland. On this trip of four and a half months, the scientist in him made observations on seals and bears which, years later, he updated and turned into a book; but at the same time the adventurer became entranced by this world of sea and ice.

Obtaining the post of zoological curator at the Bergen Museum later that year, Nansen spent the next six years in intensive scientific study, punctuating his work with visits to some of the great laboratories on the Continent and once by an extraordinary trek across Norway from Bergen to Oslo and back on skis. In 1888 he successfully defended his dissertation on the central nervous system of certain lower vertebrates for the doctorate at the University of Oslo.

For a long time Nansen had been evolving a plan to cross Greenland, whose interior had never been explored. He decided to cross from the uninhabited east to the inhabited west; in other words, once his party was put ashore, there could be no retreat. In 1926, explaining his philosophy to the students at St. Andrews in his rectorial address, Nansen said that a line of retreat from a proposed action was a snare, that one should burn his boats behind him so that there is no choice but to go forward. The party of six survived temperatures of -45° C, climbed to 9,000 feet above sea level, mastered dangerous ice, exhaustion, and privation to emerge on the west coast early in October of 1888 after a trip of about two months, bringing with them important information about the interior.

In the next four years, Nansen served as curator of the Zootomical Institute at the University of Oslo, published several articles, two books, The First Crossing of Greenland (1890) and Eskimo Life (1891), and planned a scientific and exploratory foray into the Arctic. Basing his plan on the revolutionary theory that a current carried the polar ice from east to west, Nansen put his ship, the Fram [Forward], an immensely strong and cunningly designed ship, into the ice pack off Siberia on September 22, 1893, from which it emerged thirty-five months later on August 13, 1896, into open water near Spitzbergen. Nansen was not aboard.

Realizing that the ship would not pass over the North Pole, Nansen and one companion, with thirty days' rations for twenty-eight dogs, three sledges, two kayaks, and a hundred days' rations for themselves, had set out in March of 1895 on a 400-mile dash to the Pole. In twenty-three days they traveled 140 miles over oceans of tumbled ice, getting closer to the Pole than anyone had previously been. Turning back, they made their way southwest to Franz Josef Land, wintered there in 1895-1896, started south again in May, reached Vardo, Norway, the same day the Fram reached open water and were reunited with the crew on August 21 at Tromsø.

The voyage was a high adventure but it was also a scientific expedition, the Fram serving as an oceanographic-meteorological-biological laboratory. Holding a research professorship at the University of Oslo after 1897, Nansen published six volumes of scientific observations made between 1893 and 1896. Continuing thereafter to break new ground in oceanic research, he was appointed professor of oceanography in 1908.

Nansen interrupted his research in 1905 to urge the independence of Norway from Sweden and, after the dissolution of the Union, served as his country's minister to Great Britain until May of 1908. In the next few years he led several oceanographic expeditions into polar regions, but once the world was plunged into war in 1914 and exploration was halted, he became increasingly interested in international political affairs.

For almost a year in 1917-1918, as the head of a Norwegian delegation in Washington, D. C., Nansen negotiated an agreement for a relaxation of the Allied blockade to permit shipments of essential food. In 1919, he became president of the Norwegian Union for the League of Nations and at the Peace Conference in Paris was an influential lobbyist for the adoption of the League Covenant and for recognition of the rights of small nations. From 1920 until his death he was a delegate to the League from Norway.

In the spring of 1920, the League of Nations asked Nansen to undertake the task of repatriating the prisoners of war, many of them held in Russia. Moving with his customary boldness and ingenuity, and despite restricted funds, Nansen repatriated 450,000 prisoners in the next year and a half.

In June, 1921, the Council of the League, spurred by the International Red Cross and other organizations, instituted its High Commission for Refugees and asked Nansen to administer it. For the stateless refugees under his care Nansen invented the «Nansen Passport», a document of identification which was eventually recognized by fifty-two governments. In the nine-year life of this Office, Nansen ministered to hundreds of thousands of refugees - Russian,Turkish, Armenian, Assyrian, Assyro-Chaldean - utilizing the methods that were to become classic: custodial care, repatriation, rehabilitation, resettlement, emigration, integration.

The Red Cross in 1921 asked Nansen to take on yet a third humanitarian task, that of directing relief for millions of Russians dying in the famine of 1921-1922. Help for Russia, then suspect in the eyes of most of the Western nations, was hard to muster, but Nansen pursued his task with awesome energy. In the end he gathered and distributed enough supplies to save a staggering number of people, the figures quoted ranging from 7,000,000 to 22,000,000.

In 1922 at the request of the Greek government and with the approval of the League of Nations, Nansen tried to solve the problem of the Greek refugees who poured into their native land from their homes in Asia Minor after the Greek army had been defeated by the Turks. Nansen arranged an exchange of about 1,250,000 Greeks living on Turkish soil for about 500,000 Turks living in Greece, with appropriate indemnification and provisions for giving them the opportunity for a new start in life.

Nansen's fifth great humanitarian effort, at the invitation of the League in 1925, was to save the remnants of the Armenian people from extinction. He drew up a political, industrial, and financial plan for creating a national home for the Armenians in Erivan that foreshadowed what the United Nations Technical Assistance Board and the International Bank of Development and Reconstruction have done in the post-World War II period. The League failed to implement the plan, but the Nansen International Office for Refugees later settled some 10,000 in Erivan and 40,000 in Syria and Lebanon.

Nansen died on May 13, 1930, and was buried on May 17, Norway's Constitution Day.

Find something you can do in your community, or even by yourself, to fight genocide in any way - pray to God, go for a walk and think, dream BIG!!!

Industrial Ghostwriters for Big Pharma - Alias the Funny Farm

noreply@blogger.com (Karen S. Cole) — Wed, 20 Sep 2017 16:34:00 +0000

Big Pharma’s Attempt to Ghostwrite for Stat Ended Badly—but Not Badly Enough

Well, if everyone ends up on meds, we're stuck like Hitler. He was on meds, might be why the Holocaust happened. Okay? Don't go on them until after you've read this story. Karen

Stat retracted the story, but for the wrong reasons and without addressing the real problem.

By Charles Seife

"Independent" experts have been drafted into becoming Sock Puppets. For large pharmaceutical companies that make Psychiatric Medications happen. These meds were put out of human control originally, and they do nothing but poison you to death while claiming they help you.

The ghosts struck again last week. This time it was in Boston.

There’s no question that it was them. Once you’ve seen enough of these shadowy figures, you can spot them from a distance. You learn to smell the faint aroma of tobacco that always surrounds them—after all, tobacco companies were the first to conjure them.

Industrial ghostwriters started appearing in the 1960s, when people were figuring out that cigarettes cause cancer, and later, in the 1980s and 1990s, when scientists began to probe the effects of secondhand smoke. In response, tobacco executives started to summon legions of ghostwriters, called by the ritual sacrifice of stacks of little green pieces of paper. In return, they tried to sway public opinion by putting soothing, tobacco-friendly words in the mouths of seemingly unaffiliated scientists.

Since then, ghostwriters employed by parts of the pharmaceutical industry have been busily tobacconizing the scientific literature. Gaze into the depths of PubMed for long enough, and they will materialize before your eyes, promoting Wyeth’s Prempro, Merck’s Vioxx, and Pfizer’s Neurontin, just to name a few. (It’s not only Big Pharma that’s been dabbling in the dark arts; recently, for example, ghosts were spotted defending Monsanto’s Roundup.)

But the haunting in Boston was something different.

Last week, Stat, the health and science website affiliated with the Boston Globe, was the subject of a particularly embarrassing haunting. It came in the form of an editorial defending the much-maligned pharmaceutical industry representative, purportedly written by a North Carolina neurologist but later revealed to have been written by a public-relations firm—a firm that is apparently linked to a set of shady nonprofit organizations that churn out relentlessly pharma-friendly messages.

There’s been a lot of work done to expose ghostwriting in the peer-reviewed literature, but few have spent any effort trying to find it lurking in the popular press. Nevertheless, it’s endemic. Since the heyday of Big Tobacco, “independent” experts have been drafted into becoming sock puppets—cheerfully putting their names on ghostwritten op-eds and letters to the editor, typically in return for nice checks from their corporate masters. They’re so prevalent that even an outlet as reputable as Statcan wind up being possessed by ghosts—without them, or anybody else, even noticing.

It was only after readers of the column (including yours truly) spotted inconsistencies in the editorial that Stat initially posted a correction and then retracted the article. Rather than reassuring readers, though, the retraction should disturb them. For the article was retracted not because the article was ghostwritten, but because the ghostwriter happened to fabricate a key anecdote.

Stat was likely aware that the article had been ghostwritten; at the very least, the editor of the opinion section, Pat Skerrett, let slip that he knew that a PR agency was involved in the shaping of the piece. In fact, many opinion sections have a grudging acceptance of some degree of ghostwriting in their pages; after all, high officials and A-list celebrities have entire staffs hired to meticulously shape each public utterance. But even if you accept that kind of ghostwriting, the industrial version of ghosting is an entirely different beast. Instead of putting the words of an unknown in the mouths of the powerful, it does just the opposite—it disseminates the words of the powerful by putting them in the mouth of the unknown. Indeed, in this case, it used the trusted institution of a friendly doctor to spread the gospel of the pharmaceutical industry. It’s not the sheep in wolf’s clothing that’s to be feared, but the reverse.

That Stat found a big fat lie in its opinion section is a graphic demonstration that ghosting of articles by industry is not just a problem of the peer-reviewed journals, but of the media as well—and not just outlets devoted to covering health and medicine. Just as medical journals started tightening rules about conflicts of interest, forcing more disclosure of the hidden motives behind certain research articles, media outlets have to have a reckoning as well. They must learn to stop amplifying the messages of front groups and winking at practices like ghostwriting in their editorial pages. In short, the media must realize that every time they repeat a sock puppet’s message, it directly undermines to the outlet’s credibility. And they must take such tobacco-scented challenges to their authenticity seriously, lest they begin to earn the cries of “fake news” that enemies of the press like to fling at them.

It may be a losing battle; the wealthy industries using these tactics are adept at harnessing the forces of capitalism to defeat any attempt at transparency. After all, it’s nigh impossible to see who’s really pulling the strings when the invisible hand gets involved.

Natural Disaster Sierra Leone mudslides 2017

noreply@blogger.com (Karen S. Cole) — Tue, 15 Aug 2017 20:50:00 +0000

Sierra Leone mudslides: Urgent plea for help as death toll rises

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-40933490

Google: GHOST WRITER INC for your Ghost Writing, Ghostwriting or Editing book, screenplay, music, freelance and contracted copy writing, and all of your writing related needs. Ghost Writer, Inc. also has top level marketers, promoters, and publishing or optioning assistance services. Visit www.rainbowriting.com (only one "w") as soon as you're done with this blog, if you are serious about your worthwhile project. We will consider doing work for non-profit organizations, if we can get a grant for ghostwriting or editing a book project, or something along those lines. Thank you for your valuable time.

Forest Fire Survival - Only People can Prevent Forest Fires

noreply@blogger.com (Karen S. Cole) — Thu, 03 Aug 2017 04:51:00 +0000

We see more of this because we're looking for them. Didn't have the Internet in the year 300 BC. No Forest Services. It's the era of news and study, and there used to be MORE forest fires, before. There are LESS forest fires nowadays, is an extremely good bet. So don't panic, it's evolving. But just in case you need to get it, Karen the Know-it-All just has to tell you all about it. I saved some of the City of Seattle and King County environs from an all-encompassing forest fire in 1986, which means there is hope. ALWAYS HOPE!!!

Dear Readers needing Forest Fire Survival:

Well, it's coming. Slowly but surely. No, it's less than half of 1% of the Planet Earth. And so is the human race. Meanwhile, the air is muggy and damp. So maybe we near the Big City of Seattle will survive. Nothing will happen to us. When you hit the freeway, if your car is stopped dead on the road, it's not unlikely you will roast alive in your car. So abandoning your car and hoofing it or riding a bicycle may be best, if you are feeling trapped in your car. Can't get around the other cars on the Freeway. Heading for the nearest entrance to one may be best, though, if you are fairly sure which direction the Forest Fire(s) are coming from. Prayer is good, too, of course (cough) but actually, driving away from the nearest one might possibly save you and yours.

Do everything you can to hang onto the very last second, because you will. Well, buy gas masks, don't wet anything, woolen blankets are best or fireproof gear or fire retardant clothing that is light so you can run away or alongside it. Orange seen above the tree lines, that lets you know. Head away from the orange glow, in the opposite direction. Best is in a car. If clogged up, hit the road on foot or on a bicycle, motorcycle or what have you. AVOID FORESTS AND TREES LIKE THE PLAGUE, THAT IS EXACTLY WHERE IT WILL BE COMING FROM.

Other than that...store some food, have major cooling systems installed, stay in your house, or build a concrete bunker beneath your normal abode and use it as your Forest Fire Shelter. Major cooling systems need to be installed. Forest Fire Survival is paramount. Nature is merely cleaning out an area, so the human race surviving it is not unlikely. Forest fires are Nature's way of ensuring the resurrection of a new forest, and of new territory being uncovered and also built upon by human beings. So it's not the End of the World, it's the Beginning of New World melting backs. So that your back is not melting, buy some survival gear. I don't recommend the thin mesh shirts, go to your nearest Army/Navy store outlet (actual physical store where you buy stuff) and buy some heavier gear in order to wrap yourself in something fireproof or heatproof or BOTH!

Google: GHOST WRITER INC for your Ghost Writing, Ghostwriting or Editing book, screenplay, music, freelance and contracted copy writing, and all of your writing related needs. Ghost Writer, Inc. also has top level marketers, promoters, and publishing or optioning assistance services. Visit www.rainbowriting.com (only one "w") as soon as you're done with this blog, if you are serious about your worthwhile project. We will consider doing work for non-profit organizations, if we can get a grant for ghostwriting or editing a book project, or something along those lines. Thank you for your valuable time.

Yazidis genocide

noreply@blogger.com (Karen S. Cole) — Wed, 02 Aug 2017 16:21:00 +0000

Almost 10,000 Yazidis ‘killed or kidnapped in Isis genocide but true scale of horror may never be known’

More than 3,000 people were executed out of a total of 10,000 killed in matter of days in 2014, a new study finds, with scores of people forced into sex slavery and conversions. Some of them made it to "decent" lives. Some of them made it elsewhere, with no work back to us. Some of them made it to Heaven. And some of them are currently making the pizza you are eating right now. 2017 will be 2018. But a lot of them remember being the Yazidis.

Genocide in Biafra 1967 to 1970

noreply@blogger.com (Karen S. Cole) — Mon, 08 May 2017 21:04:00 +0000

Letter from Sady Alejandro Reyes

Hi,

How're you today? I'm Sady Alejandro Reyes a Citizen of Madrid Spain
but living in Fort Lauderdale Florida United State, 62 years old man,
I'm a Biafran Sympathizer, Supporter and Adviser.

I'm here to bring to you this heart touching History maybe you might
have read of it, it's the Genocide committed against the good people
of Biafra by the Nigerian Government with the help of the United
Kingdom in 1967 to 1970. The whole sympathetic story started from the
amalgamation of three different language speaking ethnic groups in
1914 by (Sir Lord Fredrick Lugard) The people from North, West, East
and the minority South was forced by the UK colonial master to answer
Nigeria.

Follow this link to view few of the Genocide videos where millions of
Women and Children were starved to death:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B6646BLGID0

Now is the time for the world power (United Nation UN, European Nation
EU, Organization Of African Union OAU, International Communities,
Amnesty international and the good people of the world like you to
come out in support to ensure that justice, total freedom and
restoration of the Biafra Nation will be given to the people of
Biafra.

I urge you to be a Sympathizer/Supporter also you can even join the
family of the Indigenous People Of Biafra IPOB Worldwide just write to
the email addresses bellow.

As I write to you now you should also know there is a court case going
on in that contraption called Nigeria between the Indigenous People Of
Biafra IPOB and the Nigerian government.

For more information also wanna be a Sympathizer, Supporter, Partner,
IPOB Family and Adviser to the Self Determined People Of Biafra
(SDPOB) just email the addresses bellow:

Deputy Leader Ipob, Radio Biafra and Biafra TV, Uche Mefor on +44 703
193 9756 email: deptileader.ipob.biafra17@gmail.com

Barrister Ifeanyi Ejiofor Cancel to the Leader of the Indigenous
People Of Biafra (IPOB) Nnamudi Kanu, Also the head of their legal
team on ipoblegalhead.cancelejiofor01@gmail.com

You can as well email me on reyesnusarmy2010@gmail.com

I await to hearing from you soon.

Best regards

A Sady Reyes

North Korea Kim Jong Un Death Camps 2017

noreply@blogger.com (Karen S. Cole) — Sat, 29 Apr 2017 21:38:00 +0000

Inside Kim Jong-un's camps of death: Thousands sent to North Korea's secret prisons face being starved, beaten, raped and butchered

Prison guard Lim Hye-jin has revealed what she saw at a North Korean camp.

She was left so traumatised after what she witnessed she could not eat for days.

Lim, who 20 at the time, saw two brothers "get beheaded in front of everyone."

By Ian Birrell In Seoul For The Mail On Sunday

PUBLISHED: 17:03 EDT, 29 April 2017 | UPDATED: 17:06 EDT, 29 April 2017

This is a satellite image of Camp 12, a fenced-off farm growing corn and peppers near the Chinese border, and was where Lim first began working, aged 17.

Lim Hye-jin still shivers at the memory of two brothers who managed to escape briefly from her massive concentration camp in the mountains of North Korea. Seven family members were killed on the spot in revenge. Scores more prisoners were savagely beaten as collective punishment for the breakout.

Several weeks later, guards and inmates were ordered to gather as the pair – their bodies battered from torture – were dragged back behind the barbed wire. They had been caught in China and returned to the repressive regime.

'The two brothers were beheaded in front of everyone,' said Lim. 'They called everyone to watch as a warning not to flee. The other prisoners then had to throw stones at them.'

The scene left Lim, then 20, so traumatised she could not eat for days. Yet it was just one of many terrible incidents she saw during seven years as a camp guard, including routine killings, torture and rape of political prisoners declared enemies of the state.

One woman was stripped naked, then casually set on fire after annoying a guard during interrogation. 'They do not see them as human beings, just as animals,' said Lim.

Now Lim – who ended up in prison herself after being caught trading in China – has spoken exclusively about her experiences, offering a unique insight into the horrors of North Korea's forced labour camps holding an estimated 200,000 people.

Her revelations come as tensions continue to rise on the Korean peninsula. US President Donald Trump is pressing China to act over its cruel neighbour with warnings of possible 'major conflict' if the stand-off over North Korea's attempts to develop nuclear weapons is not resolved through diplomacy.

Lim is the first female guard to talk openly about her experiences.

'We were manipulated not to feel any sympathy for prisoners,' she said. 'We were told they had committed terrible crimes. Now I know they were normal people so I feel very guilty.'

Few have escaped these hidden hellholes, modelled on Stalin's gulags and compared to those run by the Nazis. Even children are incarcerated for life, along with parents and grandparents, under rules that punish three generations for perceived dissidence.

One defector told me he was the only one of 5,000 children to escape his camp, which held close to 50,000 people. Many prisoners are stunted and deformed by hunger and back-breaking labour in freezing forests and deep mines. Former inmates told me of living in fear of constant beatings, of injured people dumped to die in the snow, of hundreds sealed beneath ground after mining accidents, of rotting corpses piled beside huts, of catching snakes to survive deadly starvation.

Satellite evidence suggests some of these barbaric units have grown since Kim Jong Un took over the family dictatorship six years ago, although their existence is denied.

Camp 12, a fenced-off farm growing corn and peppers near the Chinese border, was where Lim first began working, aged 17. Inmates included high-ranking officials who had fallen out of favour with the regime.

Guards, brought up in a system that deifies the Kim dynasty, were given brainwashing sessions twice a week and told not to see prisoners as humans. 'Even if a guard was driving and ran over a child, there would not be real punishment,' she said.

Most inmates at the two camps where she worked were women and children. 'If men were healthy they would be sent to the mines where they were used as disposable labour. Many died. They were also made to psychologically suffer.'

One survivor told me of frequent accidents in quarries and mines as exhausted inmates worked round the clock. 'On one occasion, 300 people lost their lives in a gas explosion. The guards just closed off the tunnels with others trapped inside to stop the fires and gas spreading.'

Hundreds are also alleged to have died hollowing out huge tunnels in Mount Mantap for the testing of nuclear weapons and then clearing the contaminated sites afterwards.

Lim said male guards abused women in camps by having what they called 'affairs' with them. 'It was basically rape because prisoners did not have the right to say no.'

If women became pregnant, they had to have abortions or were killed by lethal injection, and if pregnancy was too advanced, babies were beaten to death or buried alive.

Camps have 'reward marriages', in which model prisoners are given a mate selected by camp chiefs as an incentive to work hard. Men and women are otherwise kept apart.

Prisoners work seven days a week, are woken at 5am and spend up to 16 hours slaving away in fields and factories before evening 're-education' sessions at which they might be made to memorise official edicts. Failure means being kept awake all night. Inspections take place three times a day to check no one has fled through three rings of barbed wire surrounding the camps and anyone out of their dormitory at night is shot.

Lim said even after death, prisoners were denied humanity. 'All the bodies were piled up to one side. There was no respect, no funeral process. After a week the corpses would be burned.'

Wearing ragged ex-army uniforms and sandals made from tyres, inmates suffer starvation, surviving on meagre rations of corn and salt. Yet anyone caught taking food from fields or orchards faces a lethal beating or being locked in an underground cell too small to stand in.

'When I arrived it was like a scene from a horror movie,' said Kang Chol Hwan, sent to Yodok concentration camp aged nine after his grandfather was accused of sedition. 'I once watched a film about Auschwitz and I could relate so much to the situation.' He was always hungry during a decade in the camp. Many inmates die from malnutrition in the first few months. 'We were never given protein so we would catch snakes, rats, even insects.'

Kang spoke of ceaseless fear during his incarceration, with beatings commonplace. Once he had to watch a group of people being hanged, then guards made them throw stones at the dangling dead. 'They left the bodies so crows came and ate the flesh,' he added.

Almost all the inmates are locked up following arbitrary arrest, with many having no idea what 'crime' they or their relatives have committed. Offences have included leaving dust on a picture of the 'supreme leader', holding a religious service and listening to foreign radio.

Jung Gwang Il spent three years in Yodok after being arrested for alleged spying. He was so badly tortured even before entry he could only crawl in on his hands and knees, having lost half his body weight after months held in stress positions. 'It was a living hell. All the people were suffering from malnutrition. They did not look like human beings,' he said. Jung, 54, said any sense of solidarity was crushed from prisoners ordered to inform on fellow inmates or face savage punishment. 'People believe that once you show sympathy towards others, it will bite you back,' he said. 'I saw a kid who looked so weak I suggested he went to a special area for people in a bad situation. He told a guard. I got beaten up so badly with a thick stick I nearly died. The guard asked me who was I to make decisions for others?'

During winter his 400-strong group worked in forests but, all too often, the tired and hungry prisoners moved too slowly to avoid falling trees chopped down for lumber. 'The guards just laughed as people were crushed.'

Since the ground was frozen and work could not stop, corpses were thrown in a big pile. 'Some were not dead. At night when I went to the toilet, I heard their moaning. These injured people froze to death.'

This gruesome heap grew until the ground thawed in spring. 'It was like a huge pile of garbage. They were all rotten,' said Jung, who now smuggles films and human-rights information back into the state that betrayed him so badly. He remains deeply traumatised, despite defecting more than a decade ago.

Noh Hui Chang, one of the most senior defectors this century, said: 'All citizens are aware of the camps. This is a regime of fear, everyone is so scared of what might happen.'

Noh, former head of the ruling party's youth wing, fled in 2014 after his close ally – and Kim Jong Un's uncle – was killed by the new leader. During our discussion, he cried after revealing that his wife, children and brothers were sent to a camp after his escape.

Ahn Myung-Chul, who worked as a guard in four different camps, said: 'Those who die are the lucky ones. This is modern-day slavery, torturing people over decades.'

For his first three years, brainwashed and believing the propaganda, Ahn beat inmates and used them as targets for martial arts practice. Then one day he was bored and talked to a prisoner, suddenly discovering they were innocent people.

He said some guards enjoyed torture. One day his boss killed an elderly prisoner in a brick factory by smashing a metal bar on his head. 'He was never punished for this.'Lim Hye-jin still shivers at the memory of two brothers who managed to escape briefly from her massive concentration camp in the mountains of North Korea. Seven family members were killed on the spot in revenge. Scores more prisoners were savagely beaten as collective punishment for the breakout.

Guards could even advance their ambitions though murder. 'One man dragged two men and three women to the fences, then shot them claiming he'd caught them escaping. He was rewarded with admission to a top university.'

In atonement for past misdeeds, Ahn now campaigns against these camps, including the one holding his mother and sister. 'I wish I did not know the details but I know how they will be doing,' he said sadly.

Three years ago the United Nations condemned North Korea's camps as crimes against humanity and without parallel on the planet, yet even now there is no reliable footage from camps the size of cities. Ahn worked at one that is 30 miles long and 25 miles wide.

'Their size is matched only by the cruelty,' said Thor Halvorssen, of the Human Rights Foundation, which assists defectors. 'Not since the concentration camps of the Nazis and gulags of Stalin has humanity seen such a meticulously organised system to punish and dehumanise a population.'

Today the middle-aged Lim lives in Seoul, just 35 miles but a world away from the despotic regime that held her in its rigid grip.

She defected 15 years ago after a short spell in prison, deciding to flee when forced to parade naked before male guards.

She fears the camps have become even worse since she left and is angry at the system she served once with such loyalty.

'I feel so betrayed by leaders who lied to us,' she said. 'We were told not to see these people as humans. Now I feel traumatised.'

Satellite evidence suggests some of these barbaric units have grown since Kim Jong Un (pictured) took over the family dictatorship six years ago.

Worldwide Genocide 2017

noreply@blogger.com (Karen S. Cole) — Sun, 12 Mar 2017 00:29:00 +0000

Genocide Conflicts to Watch in 2017

January 8, 2017 | Jean-Marie Guehenno | Foreign Policy

Syrian Abu Khaled looks at the rubble of his destroyed house in the rebel-held town of Douma on Dec. 30, 2016. (Photo credit: ABD DOUMANY/AFP/Getty Images); Displaced Iraqis from Mosul's eastern neighbourhoods arrive in the Al-Quds neighborhood on January 3. (Photo credit: AHMAD AL-RUBAYE/AFP/Getty Images)

The world is entering its most dangerous chapter in decades. The sharp uptick in war over recent years is outstripping our ability to cope with the consequences. From the global refugee crisis to the spread of terrorism, our collective failure to resolve conflict is giving birth to new threats and emergencies. Even in peaceful societies, the politics of fear is leading to dangerous polarization and demagoguery.

It is against this backdrop that Donald Trump was elected the next president of the United States — unquestionably the most important event of last year and one with far-reaching geopolitical implications for the future. Much has been said about the unknowns of Trump’s foreign-policy agenda. But one thing we do know is that uncertainty itself can be profoundly destabilizing, especially when it involves the most powerful actor on the global stage. Already, jittery allies from Europe to East Asia are parsing Trump’s tweets and casual bluster. Will he cut a deal with Russia over the heads of Europeans? Will he try to undo the Iran nuclear accord? Is he seriously proposing a new arms race?

Who knows about Genocide? And that is precisely the problem.

The last 60 years have suffered their share of crises, from Vietnam to Rwanda to the Iraq War. But the vision of a cooperative international order that emerged after World War II, championed and led by the United States, has structured relations between major powers since the end of the Cold War.

That order was in flux even before Trump won the election. The retrenchment of Washington, for both good and ill, began during Barack Obama’s presidency. But Obama worked to shore up international institutions to fill the gap. Today, we can no longer assume that a United States shaped by “America first” will provide the bricks and mortar of the international system. U.S. hard power, when not accompanied and framed by its soft power, is more likely to be perceived as a threat rather than the reassurance that it has been for many.

In Europe, uncertainty over the new U.S. political posture is compounded by the messy aftermath of Brexit. Nationalist forces have gained strength, and upcoming elections in France, Germany, and the Netherlands will test the future of the European project. The potential unraveling of the European Union is one of the greatest challenges we face today — a fact that is lost amid the many other alarming developments competing for attention. We cannot afford to lose Europe’s balancing voice in the world.

Exacerbated regional rivalries are also transforming the landscape, as is particularly evident in the competition between Iran and the Persian Gulf countries for influence in the Middle East. The resulting proxy wars have had devastating consequences from Syria to Iraq to Yemen.

Terrorism is just a tactic, and fighting a tactic cannot define a strategy. Jihadi groups exploit wars and state collapse to consolidate power, and they thrive on chaos.

Many world leaders claim that the way out of deepening divisions is to unite around the shared goal of fighting terrorism. But that is an illusion: Terrorism is just a tactic, and fighting a tactic cannot define a strategy. Jihadi groups exploit wars and state collapse to consolidate power, and they thrive on chaos. In the end, what the international system really needs is a strategy of conflict prevention that shores up, in an inclusive way, the states that are its building blocks. The international system needs more than the pretense of a common enemy to sustain itself.

With the advent of the Trump administration, transactional diplomacy, already on the rise, looks set to increase. Tactical bargaining is replacing long-term strategies and values-driven policies. A rapprochement between Russia and Turkey holds some promise for reducing the level of violence in Syria. However, Moscow and Ankara must eventually help forge a path toward more inclusive governance — or else they risk being sucked ever deeper into the Syrian quagmire. A stable Middle East is unlikely to emerge from the temporary consolidation of authoritarian regimes that ignore the demands of the majority of their people.

The EU, long a defender of values-based diplomacy, has struck bargains with Turkey, Afghanistan, and African states to stem the flow of migrants and refugees — with worrying global consequences. On the other hand, Europe could take advantage of any improvement in U.S.-Russia relations to reset arms control for both conventional and nuclear forces, which would be more opportune than opportunistic.

Beijing’s hardheaded approach in its relationship with other Asian countries and with Africa and Latin America shows what a world deprived of the implicit reassurance of the United States will look like.

Such transactional arrangements may look like a revival of realpolitik. But an international system guided by short-term deal-making is unlikely to be stable. Deals can be broken when they do not reflect longer-term strategies. Without a predictable order, widely accepted rules, and strong institutions, the space for mischief is greater. The world is increasingly fluid and multipolar, pushed and pulled by a diverse set of states and nonstate actors — by armed groups as well as by civil society. In a bottom-up world, major powers cannot single-handedly contain or control local conflicts, but they can manipulate or be drawn into them: Local conflicts can be the spark that lights much bigger fires.

Whether we like it or not, globalization is a fact. We are all connected. Syria’s war triggered a refugee crisis that contributed to Brexit, whose profound political and economic consequences will again ripple outward. Countries may wish to turn inward, but there is no peace and prosperity without more cooperative management of world affairs.

This list of 10 conflicts to watch in 2017 illustrates some of the broader trends but also explores ways to reverse the dangerous dynamics.

1. Syria and Iraq

After nearly six years of fighting, an estimated 500,000 people killed, and some 12 million uprooted, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad appears likely to maintain power for now, but even with foreign backing his forces cannot end the war and regain total control. This was evident in the recent recapture of Palmyra by the Islamic State, just nine months after a Russian-backed military campaign had expelled the group. Assad’s strategy to cripple the non-jihadi opposition has worked to empower radical Islamist groups like the Islamic State and Jabhat Fateh al-Sham (formerly the Nusra Front). Non-jihadi rebels have been further weakened by the recent defeat in Aleppo; they remain fractious and undermined by their state backers’ divergent approaches.

The regime’s December recapture of eastern Aleppo marked a cruel turning point, with the regime and its allies succeeding by relentlessly besieging and bombarding civilians. Western diplomats expressed horror and outrage yet failed to muster a concrete response. The evacuation of civilians and rebels ultimately proceeded, haltingly, only after Russia, Turkey, and Iran struck a deal. This troika followed up with a meeting in Moscow to “revitalize the political process” for ending the war. Neither the United States nor the United Nations was invited or even consulted. A cease-fire deal brokered by Russia and Turkey at the end of December appeared to fall apart within days, as the regime continued military offensives in the suburbs of Damascus. Despite the significant challenges ahead, this new diplomatic track opens the best possibility for reducing the level of violence in Syria.

The war against the Islamic State is likely to continue, and there is an urgent need to ensure it will not fuel further violence and destabilization. In Syria, two competing efforts against the group — one led by Ankara, the other by the Syrian affiliate of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) — are entangled with the conflict between the Turkish state and PKK inside Turkey. Washington has backed both efforts while trying to minimize direct clashes between them. The incoming Trump administration should prioritize de-escalating the conflict between its Turkish and Kurdish partners above the immediate capture of territory from jihadis. If violence between the two spirals, the Islamic State will be the first to gain.

The Islamic State still claims a caliphate across parts of Iraq and Syria, although it has lost significant territory over the past year. Even if it is defeated militarily, it or another radical group may well re-emerge unless underlying governance issues are addressed. The Islamic State itself grew from a similar failure in Iraq. It is spreading an ideology that is still mobilizing young people across the globe and poses threats well beyond the borders of Iraq and Syria, as recent attacks in Istanbul and Berlin have shown.

In Iraq, the fight against the Islamic State has further undermined the state’s ability to govern, caused enormous destruction, militarized youth, and traumatized Iraqi society. It has fragmented Kurdish and Shiite political parties into rival factions and paramilitary forces dependent on regional backers and competing over Iraq’s resources. The fight to defeat the Islamic State, whose rise has fed on deep grievances among Sunni Arabs, has compounded the damage done by the group’s rule. To avoid worse, Baghdad and the Kurdistan Regional Government need support and pressure to rein in paramilitary groups.

Success in the current U.S.-backed military campaign to retake Mosul, if mishandled, could turn into failure. Besides the regular Iraqi Army, special counterterrorism forces, and federal police who are leading the effort inside the city, local groups are also involved, seeking spoils of victory. Moreover, Iran and Turkey are competing for influence by using local proxies. The longer the battle drags on, the more these various groups will exploit opportunities to gain strategic advantage through territorial control, complicating a political settlement.

Iraq, with support from the United States and other partners, should continue military and logistics support to Iraqi forces pushing into the city and establish locally recruited stabilization forces in areas retaken from the Islamic State to ensure that military gains are not again lost. They will also need to jump-start governance involving local, and locally accepted, political actors.

2. Turkey

A New Year’s Day attack in Istanbul — which killed at least 39 people — seems like a harbinger of more violence to come. The Islamic State claimed responsibility for the attack, a departure from the group’s general practice in Turkey that could signal an escalation. In addition to worsening spillover from the wars in Syria and Iraq, Turkey also faces a spiraling conflict with the PKK. Politically polarized, under economic strain, and with weak alliances, Turkey is poised for greater upheaval.

The conflict between the state and PKK militants continues to deteriorate following the collapse of a cease-fire in July 2015. Since then, the PKK conflict has entered one of the deadliest chapters in its three-decade history, with at least 2,500 militants, security forces, and civilians killed as both sides opt for further escalation. Clashes and security operations have displaced more than 350,000 civilians and flattened several city districts in Turkey’s majority Kurdish southeast. A PKK-linked double bomb attack killed 45 people near a soccer stadium in Istanbul in December. In response, the government is once again jailing representatives of the Kurdish movement, blocking a crucial channel to a political settlement that must include fundamental rights protections for Kurds in Turkey.

Though rooted in local sentiments, the escalation is also driven by Ankara’s growing concern over Kurdish gains in northern Syria and Iraq. This, and the danger posed by the Islamic State, persuaded Ankara to send its first detachments of troops into both countries, sucking it further into the Middle East maelstrom.

Domestically, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s government continues its crackdown on political opposition and dissent and is pushing for constitutional changes to usher in a presidential system — likely to be put to a public referendum in early spring. In the wake of the coup attempt last July, the government launched a massive crackdown, purging more than 100,000 officials.

Turkey’s Western allies, though dependent on a strong NATO partner on Europe’s southern border, have been strongly critical of the government’s authoritarian bent. This adds to the tensions created by stagnating negotiations between the EU and Ankara over Turkey’s accession to the bloc. In November, Erdogan responded angrily to criticism from Brussels, threatening to tear up the March 2016 refugee deal by which Ankara agreed to prevent the flow of Syrian refugees from moving onward to Europe. More than 2.7 million Syrian refugees are currently registered in Turkey; their integration poses significant challenges for the state and for host communities.

Relations with Washington are strained by Turkey’s military escalation with U.S.-allied Kurdish forces in Syria and by Turkey’s call for Washington to extradite alleged coup mastermind Fethullah Gulen. Ankara has reached an uneasy rapprochement with Moscow, and the December assassination of Russia’s ambassador to Turkey has, for the moment, brought the two countries closer together. Ankara is increasingly downplaying its Western alliances and scrambling to make arrangements with Russia and Iran. However, Turkey and Iran are still on a dangerous course, fueled by profound disagreement over their respective core interests in Iraq and Syria.

3. Yemen

The war in Yemen has created another humanitarian catastrophe, wrecking a country that was already the poorest in the Arab world. With millions of people now on the brink of famine, the need for a comprehensive cease-fire and political settlement is ever more urgent. Yemenis have suffered tremendous hardships from air bombardments, rocket attacks, and economic blockades. According to the U.N., approximately 4,000 civilians have been killed, the majority in Saudi-led coalition airstrikes. All parties to the conflict stand accused of war crimes, including indiscriminate attacks on civilian areas.

Saudi Arabia entered the conflict in March 2015 to counter advances made by the Houthis, a predominantly Zaydi Shiite militia viewed by Riyadh as a proxy for its archrival, Iran. Although the Houthis are not closely tied to Iran, it serves Tehran’s interests to have Saudi Arabia stuck in a vicious stalemate in Yemen.

Both sides appear locked in a cycle of escalating violence and provocations, derailing U.N. peace talks. In November, the Saudi-backed Yemeni government led by President Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi rejected the U.N.’s proposed roadmap. That same month, the Houthi movement and its allies, mainly forces under former President Ali Abdullah Saleh, formed a new government. Despite the challenges, it may still be possible to convince the parties to accept the roadmap as the basis for a compromise that would end regional aspects of the war and return it to an inter-Yemeni process. Much depends on Saudi Arabia’s calculations and the willingness of its international sponsors, especially the United States and Britain, to encourage Riyadh to fully support the political compromise on offer. Failure to get the process back on track carries risks for all involved, as violent jihadi groups, including al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and the Islamic State, are thriving in Yemen’s chaos.

4. Greater Sahel and Lake Chad Basin

Overlapping conflicts across the Greater Sahel and Lake Chad Basin have contributed to massive human suffering, including the uprooting of some 4.2 million people from their homes. Jihadis, armed groups, and criminal networks jockey for power across this impoverished region, where borders are porous and governments have limited reach.

In 2016, jihadis based in Central Sahel launched deadly attacks in western Niger, Burkina Faso, and Côte d’Ivoire, underscoring the region’s vulnerability. Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb and al-Mourabitoun remain active while a new group claiming affiliation to the Islamic State is developing. All appear likely to continue attacks targeting civilians, as well as national and international forces. Mali is the U.N.’s most dangerous peacekeeping mission, with 70 personnel killed by “malicious acts” since 2013.

Mali could face a major crisis this year, as implementation of the 2015 Bamako peace agreement threatens to stall. The recent fracturing of the main rebel alliance in the north, the Coordination of Azawad Movements, has contributed to a proliferation of armed groups, and violence has spread to central Mali. Regional powers should use the upcoming African Union summit in January to revive the peace process and possibly bring in groups that are currently left out. Algeria, an important broker of stability in the region, has a key role to play as the deal’s chief mediator.

In the Lake Chad Basin, the security forces of Nigeria, Niger, Cameroon, and Chad have stepped up their fight against the Boko Haram insurgency. At the end of December, the Nigerian president announced the “final crushing of Boko Haram terrorists in their last enclave” in the Sambisa Forest, yet the group has not been vanquished. A leadership quarrel has split the jihadi movement, but it remains resilient and aggressive. Although international attention has focused on Boko Haram’s kidnapping and abuse of women and girls, policymakers should also note that some women joined the movement voluntarily in search of economic and social opportunities. Understanding the various ways women experience the conflict should directly inform strategies to tackle the roots of the insurgency.

The Boko Haram insurgency, the aggressive military response to it, and the lack of effective assistance to those caught up in the conflict threaten to create an endless cycle of violence and despair. If regional governments do not react responsibly to the humanitarian disaster, they could further alienate communities and sow the seeds of future rebellion. States should also invest in economic development and strengthen local governance to close off opportunities for radical groups.

5. Democratic Republic of Congo

The Democratic Republic of the Congo received some good news shortly before midnight on New Year’s Eve when Catholic bishops announced that a deal had been reached to resolve the country’s political crisis. President Joseph Kabila has not yet signed on to the agreement, which requires him to step down after elections are held, sometime before the end of 2017. Despite high levels of mistrust between the parties, the deal mediated by the Congolese Catholic Church remains the best chance for a path forward. The overarching challenge now is to prepare for elections and a peaceful transition in short order, for which solid international backing is essential.

Kabila’s determination to cling to power beyond his second term, in defiance of the Congolese Constitution, met with significant opposition and volatile street protests throughout 2016 — and threatens more widespread violence to come. Congo’s endemic corruption and winner-takes-all politics mean Kabila’s entourage has much to lose, so they may not let go easily. African and Western powers need to coordinate efforts to pull Congo back from the brink and prevent further regional instability. MONUSCO, the U.N.’s largest peacekeeping mission, does not have the capacity to deal with such challenges and would be more effective with a narrower mandate, moving away from institution building and toward good offices and human rights monitoring.

Last September, at least 53 people were killed, mostly by security forces, when demonstrations against Kabila’s rule beyond the end of his mandate turned violent. Clashes between security forces and protesters in several cities around the end of his term, on Dec. 19 and 20, reportedly killed at least 40 people. Violence is likely to continue if the elections are again postponed. The main opposition coalition, the Rassemblement, will be prepared to harness the power of the street to try to force Kabila out. The political tension in Kinshasa is also contributing to increased violence in pockets throughout the country, including the conflict-ridden east.

6. South Sudan

After three years of civil war, the world’s youngest country is still bedeviled by multiple conflicts. Grievances with the central government and cycles of ethnic violence fuel fighting that has internally displaced 1.8 million people and forced around 1.2 million to flee the country. There has been mounting international concern over reports of mass atrocities and the lack of progress toward implementing the 2015 peace agreement. In December, President Salva Kiir called for a renewed cease-fire and national dialogue to promote peace and reconciliation. Whether or not these efforts succeed depends on the transitional government’s willingness to negotiate fairly with individual armed groups and engage with disaffected communities at the grassroots level.

The internationally backed peace agreement was derailed in July 2016 when fighting flared in Juba between government forces and former rebels. Opposition leader and erstwhile Vice President Riek Machar, who had only recently returned to Juba under the terms of the deal, fled the country. Kiir has since strengthened his position in the capital and the region as a whole, which creates an opportunity to promote negotiations with elements of the armed opposition, including groups currently outside the transitional government.

The security situation in Juba has improved in recent months, although fighting and ethnic violence continue elsewhere. International diplomatic efforts are focused on the deployment of a 4,000-strong regional protection force — a distraction that would do little to quell an outbreak of major violence and pulls energy away from the deeper political engagement needed to consolidate peace. The existing U.N. peacekeeping mission in South Sudan, UNMISS, needs urgent reform — which is especially clear following its failure to protect civilians during last July’s spasm of violence in Juba. A glimmer of hope in the country’s tragedy is the delicate rapprochement underway among South Sudan, Uganda, and Sudan that might one day help guarantee greater stability.

7. Afghanistan

War and political instability in Afghanistan pose a serious threat to international peace and security, more than 15 years after U.S.-led coalition forces ousted the Taliban from power as part of a broader campaign to defeat al Qaeda. Today, the Taliban are gaining ground; the Haqqani network is responsible for attacks in major cities; and the Islamic State has claimed a series of attacks targeting Shiite Muslims that appear intent on stoking sectarian violence. The number of armed clashes last year reached the highest level since the U.N. started recording incidents in 2007, with large numbers of civilian casualties. Further weakening of the Afghan security forces would risk leaving large ungoverned spaces that could be exploited by regional and transnational militant groups.

America’s longest war barely registered as a policy issue during the U.S. presidential election. Trump’s intentions on Afghanistan remain unclear, though he has repeatedly expressed skepticism about nation building. His controversial choice for national security advisor, retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, served as director of intelligence for Joint Special Operations Command in Iraq and Afghanistan. Flynn’s proclaimed focus on “radical Islamic terrorism” as the single-most important global threat misdiagnoses the problem, with worrying implications in Afghanistan and beyond. The strategic direction over time must be toward a negotiated settlement with the Taliban, which will require greater regional convergence as well as Chinese involvement. Meanwhile, Russia, Pakistan, and China have formed a working group on Afghanistan with the stated aim of creating a “regional anti-terrorism structure.” Kabul so far has been left out of the trilateral consultations.

Afghanistan’s relations with Pakistan have long been strained due to Islamabad’s support for the Taliban and other militant groups. Tensions increased last fall as thousands of Afghan refugees in Pakistan were forced to flee amid increased violence, detentions, and harassment. Afghanistan’s refugee crisis was made worse by the EU’s plan to deport 80,000 asylum-seekers back to Afghanistan — a politically driven response to a humanitarian emergency. All this on top of the country’s economic crisis adds heavy pressures on a dangerously weak state.

8. Myanmar

The new civilian government led by Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi promised peace and national reconciliation as its top priorities; however, recent flare-ups of violence have jeopardized efforts to end nearly 70 years of armed conflict. In November, a “Northern Alliance” of four armed groups carried out unprecedented joint attacks on urban targets in a key trade zone on the Chinese border, triggering military escalation in the northeast. This does not bode well for progress at the next session of the 21st-Century Panglong Conference slated for February, part of a renewed peace process to bring together most of the country’s major ethnic armed groups.

Meanwhile, the fate of the Muslim Rohingya minority is drawing renewed international concern. The population has seen its rights progressively eroded in recent years, especially following anti-Muslim violence in Rakhine state in 2012. The latest round of violence in Rakhine was sparked by a series of attacks in October and November targeting border police and military in an area near Myanmar’s northwestern frontier with Bangladesh. Security forces hit back hard in a campaign that made little distinction between militants and civilians, with allegations of extrajudicial executions, rapes, and arson. By mid-December, the U.N. estimated that around 27,000 Rohingya had fled to Bangladesh. More than a dozen fellow Nobel laureates issued an open letter criticizing Aung San Suu Kyi for her failure to speak out about the abuses and calling for full and equal citizenship rights for the Rohingya.

The initial attacks were carried out by an armed group known as Harakah al-Yaqin (“Faith Movement”), whose emergence is a potential game-changer in Myanmar. Although the Rohingya have never been a radicalized population, the government’s heavy-handed military response increases the risk of spiraling violence. Grievances could be exploited by transnational jihadis attempting to pursue their own agendas, which would inflame religious tensions across the majority Buddhist country.

9. Ukraine

After almost three years of war and roughly 10,000 deaths, Russia’s military intervention defines all aspects of political life in Ukraine. Divided by the conflict and crippled by corruption, Ukraine is headed for even greater uncertainty. Trump’s professed admiration for Russian President Vladimir Putin scares Kiev, as do rumors that the United States may decide to scrap sanctions against Russia. Implementation of the February 2015 Minsk peace agreement is stalled, effectively bringing Russia closer to two of its goals in the Ukraine conflict: the establishment of permanent pro-Russian political entities in eastern Ukraine, as well as normalization of its annexation of Crimea that started the war in 2014.

Across Ukraine, there is growing disillusionment with leaders who were brought to power by the Maidan demonstrations of early 2014 but who now increasingly resemble the corrupt oligarchs thrown out. Western support for President Petro Poroshenko is ebbing due to Kiev’s unwillingness or inability to deliver promised economic reform and robust anti-corruption measures. Poroshenko’s problems may be compounded if early parliamentary elections are held in 2017, in which pro-Russia parties could gain ground.

The United States and EU must press Kiev harder for reforms while using strong diplomacy with Moscow, including maintaining sanctions. Putin must be convinced that there cannot be a return to normalcy in Europe so long as various forms of hybrid warfare are used to keep the situation in Ukraine unsettled. Russia’s tactics — including the use of force, cyberattacks, propaganda, and financial pressures — send a chilling message across the region.

10. Mexico

A high level of tension between the United States and Mexico might seem inevitable after Trump’s campaign pledges to build a border wall, deport millions of undocumented immigrants, and terminate the North American Free Trade Agreement. He also famously characterized Mexican immigrants as drug dealers, criminals, and rapists and drew on support from white nationalist groups. In an early effort to avoid future confrontation, Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto invited candidate Trump to visit the country in September — a move that initially backfired with a Mexican public already angry about high crime, corruption, and a weak economy.

Peña Nieto knows Mexico cannot afford to make an enemy of its mighty neighbor. Mexico’s political and business elites are reportedly out in force to convince Trump and his advisors to modify stated positions on immigration and free trade.

If the United States were to pursue a policy of massive deportations, this would risk triggering an even worse humanitarian and security crisis. Refugees and migrants from Mexico and Central America are fleeing epidemic levels of violence combined with endemic poverty. A 2016 survey found that armed violence in Mexico and the Northern Triangle had killed around 34,000 people, more than were killed in Afghanistan over the same period. Stepped-up deportations and border enforcement tend to divert undocumented migration into more dangerous channels — benefiting criminal gangs and corrupt officials. The United States can better serve its own interests by strengthening its partnership with Mexico to address the systemic failings that give rise to violence and corruption.

Jean-Marie Guéhenno is president and CEO of International Crisis Group. He served as the United Nations under secretary-general for peacekeeping operations between 2000 and 2008. He is the author of The Fog of Peace: A Memoir of Peacekeeping in the 21st Century.

© 2017 Foreign Policy

Rohingya Myanmar Genocide 2017

noreply@blogger.com (Karen S. Cole) — Sun, 12 Mar 2017 00:11:00 +0000

Is Myanmar on the Path to Genocide?

Decades of persecution have left the Rohingya on the brink of genocide.

By Michael Hart

January 18, 2017

Rohingya Muslim refugees shout slogans during a protest against what organizers say is the crackdown on ethnic Rohingyas in Myanmar, in New Delhi, India (December 19, 2016).

Image Credit: REUTERS/Adnan Abidi

Amidst the latest wave of brutal violence unleashed by security forces in Rakhine state, Myanmar’s long-persecuted Rohingya stand on the precipice of genocide. The final months of 2016 witnessed untold state-sponsored devastation and suffering in the isolated communities of the country’s remote far western region, home to almost all of Myanmar’s minority Muslim population.

The present bloodbath however is far from an isolated occurrence and should not be labeled merely as an overzealous reaction to the killing of nine border guards in an attack by unidentified gunmen on October 9, which provided the initial spark for the onslaught. Instead, the current campaign follows decades of systematic discrimination, persecution, and dehumanization, which has served to legitimize multiple waves of violence and now leaves the increasingly-helpless Rohingya on the edge of genocide.

Soon after security forces launched a crackdown in the wake of the October incident, reports began to emerge of indiscriminate and widespread human rights violations being committed in Rakhine state. Human Rights Watch reported that the army imposed strict curfews on the local population and denied access to journalists, before proceeding to carry out a sustained campaign of destruction encompassing extra-judicial executions, torture, rape, and arbitrary arrests.

Enjoying this article? Click here to subscribe for full access. Just $5 a month.

High-resolution satellite images obtained by Human Rights Watch provided evidence of the destruction of 1,250 buildings – including several mosques – across the five worst-affected villages since the violence erupted. In addition, thermal satellite data showed the presence of multiple active fires across the affected areas, which were later blamed on unspecified “terrorists” by the government. Myanmar’s leaders have labeled the violence as “communal” in nature, and have continually denied complicity in human rights abuses.

Amnesty International, however, has accused Myanmar’s authorities of subjecting the Rohingya to “collective punishment.” The respected human rights group has obtained first-hand accounts of security forces “firing at villagers from helicopter gunships, torching hundreds of homes, carrying out arbitrary arrests, and raping women and girls.” Amnesty has also described the response of the army to the October attack on the border guards as disproportionate, accusing the military of targeting “whole families and villages” of Rohingya, solely “on the basis of their ethnicity and religion.”

Despite the difficulty in obtaining information due to journalists and international observers being barred from the area, it is estimated that hundreds were killed and around 30,000 Rohingya displaced from their homes in the last few months of 2016, according to the UN. This is in addition to thousands already killed and up to 500,000 Rohingya previously displaced in earlier waves of violence. Many of the displaced live in extreme vulnerability and hardship as undocumented refugees in overcrowded and squalid camps across the border in Bangladesh.

Considering the multiple reports of atrocities carried out on the basis of identity, it becomes apparent that recent events in Rakhine state may amount to genocide. According to the 1948 United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide, its occurrence is defined as when specific acts – such as killing, or deliberately seeking to make life intolerable for certain elements of the population – are “committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.” The UN definition allows considerable room for interpretation when applied in practice – assigning a specific moment or certain number of deaths after which a campaign of killing should be labelled as “genocide” is not easy, and the boundaries will remain indefinitely blurred. However, the plight of the Rohingya appears to be heading in this direction.

So how did we get to this desperate stage – where a country which had seemingly embraced democracy after the 2015 election of human rights icon Aung San Suu Kyi stands on the verge of being complicit in genocide against a minority group living within its borders? To answer this question, it is necessary to trace the history of the Rohingya in Myanmar, exploring how their long-term alienation and marginalization from society has legitimized continual persecution and violence.

The primary cause of their marginalization dates back to the country’s 1982 Citizenship Law, drawn up by the military government of General Ne Win. The law lists 135 ethnic groups that are officially recognized as having permanently settled within the boundaries of modern-day Myanmar prior to 1823. Notably, that list excludes the Rohingya. The Citizenship Law still applies today and serves to deny the Rohingya citizenship, which effectively renders the minority group’s 800,000 members in Myanmar stateless. As a result, the Rohingya are denied even the most basic of rights – they have been prevented from traveling to other parts of the country and have been denied access to education, healthcare, land ownership, and job opportunities.

Many people in Myanmar firmly support the government’s stance, justifying the Rohingya’s exclusion from society on the basis that they do not constitute an indigenous ethnic group. Instead, they claim the term “Rohingya” is only a recent invention, used to describe colonial-era immigrants who arrived in Myanmar from modern-day India and Bangladesh during the period of British rule. This wave of migration caused much resentment at the time, due to the belief that the new arrivals were taking over jobs and land rightfully owned by native residents. The resentment lingers, with many in Myanmar still referring to the Rohingya in pejorative terms as “Bengalis” or “illegal immigrants.”

This narrative has been contested as representing only a partial truth, with historical records suggesting that a sizeable Muslim minority has lived in Arakan – the area now known as Rakhine state – for centuries, descending from Arab traders who were later assimilated by further immigration from the Indian subcontinent. However, even if the dominant narrative was wholly accurate, it should in no way serve as justification for decades of discrimination, persecution, and indiscriminate violence against the Rohingya in Myanmar.

Over the decades, a strong sense of Buddhist nationalism has fueled anti-Rohingya sentiments, resulting in the group being subjected to periodic cycles of violence. Thousands fled to Bangladesh after large-scale crackdowns in 1978 and 1991. Yet the worst outbreak of violence came in 2012, when according to Human Rights Watch, the authorities – along with mobs of local Arakanese men – committed crimes against humanity across Rakhine state. It was reported that mobs attacked Muslim communities and razed entire villages, whilst the security forces stood aside – and in some cases participated in the violence. The deadliest incident occurred in October 2012, when 70 Rohingya – including 28 children – were massacred in Yan Thei village.

Human Rights Watch found evidence of at least four mass grave sites after the 2012 crackdown, during which more than 125,000 Rohingya were displaced from their homes and forced to live in overcrowded camps lacking adequate food, water, and medical supplies. In the years since, around 110,000 refugees have left the country on flimsy boats – becoming known as the “boat people” and raising global awareness of the Rohingya’s plight – in an attempt to make the dangerous sea crossing and claim asylum in countries such as Thailand, Malaysia, and the Philippines.

In light of the latest round of bloodshed, many observers have strongly criticized Myanmar’s de facto leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, for her failure to condemn the violence in Rakhine state. There was considerable hope that things would change for the Rohingya after her sweeping electoral victory in November 2015, when her National League for Democracy (NLD) ended decades of military rule. Whilst Suu Kyi has acknowledged there are “difficulties” in western Myanmar, she has remained reluctant to speak out in defense of the Rohingya, and has instead suggested that the international media often fail to acknowledge the complexities of Myanmar’s internal affairs.

In reality, Aung San Suu Kyi is in an extremely difficult position. Criticism of her silence on the issue must be muted by recognition of the fact that Myanmar’s fragile democracy is still in its infancy, whilst the military retains a dominant influence over defense and security affairs. As a result, she may be reluctant to challenge the establishment on the Rohingya issue for fear of hard-earned progress being reversed, and the even more daunting prospect of the country returning to full military rule. In this context, her ability to intervene on the Rohingya issue is severely restricted.

As long as there remains little political will within Myanmar to avert the bloodshed in Rakhine state, the situation of the Rohingya will continue to deteriorate despite widespread international outcry and growing calls for action. The recent spike in violence is indicative of a renewed campaign to remove the Muslim minority group from Myanmar – at the very least by spreading fear and forcing thousands to risk their lives and flee across borders or the open seas. Until institutionalized and widespread discrimination against the Rohingya – sustained across decades – is meaningfully challenged within Myanmar itself, violence will continue to be legitimized, and the Rohingya will always seemingly stand on the brink of genocide.

Michael Hart is a freelance writer and researcher focusing on civil conflict and the politics of East Asia. He has run the website Geopolitical Conflict since December 2015, which was established to provide news and analysis of conflicts which are under-reported in the mainstream media.

Forced Labor Camps - Private Prisons - Immigrant Detention Centers

noreply@blogger.com (Karen S. Cole) — Tue, 28 Feb 2017 19:04:00 +0000

Private Prison Sued for 'Forced Labor'

The Daily Beast | Betsy Woodruff

The nation’s second largest private prison company is facing some serious legal challenges—and other companies may soon be in the same situation.

On Monday, a federal judge ruled that current and former detainees held at an immigrant detention center in Colorado can join a class-action lawsuit against GEO Group, a private prison company. The plaintiffs allege that the GEO Group forced detainees to work for extremely low wages or for no wages at all, and in some cases threatened detainees with solitary confinement as punishment if they refused to work. The center holds undocumented immigrants facing deportation.

“This is the first lawsuit of its kind in the history of the United States,” said Andrew Free, one of the plaintiffs’ attorneys. “This is the first time that a private prison company has ever been accused of forced labor, and this is the first time that a judge has ever found that the claims can go forward under the Trafficking Victims Protection Act and the bans in federal law on forced labor.”

GEO Group rejects the allegations.

“We have consistently, strongly refuted these allegations, and we intend to continue to vigorously defend our company against these claims,” Pablo Paez, a spokesman for the company, told The Daily Beast. “The volunteer work program at immigration facilities as well as the wage rates and standards associated with the program are set by the Federal government. Our facilities, including the Aurora, Colo. Facility, are highly rated and provide high-quality services in safe, secure, and humane residential environments pursuant to the Federal Government’s national standards.”

In the ruling, Judge John Kane granted a motion for class certification—meaning attorneys are assigned to sue on behalf of all detainees held at the facility since Oct. 22, 2004. Free told The Daily Beast he thinks the class could include as many as 60,000 people.

“GEO’s policies of forcing immigrant detainees to work for free on threat of solitary confinement or for a dollar a day are part of a broken system, said Alexander Hood of the group Towards Justice, who is also an attorney for the plaintiffs. “GEO’s Aurora facility is being run on the backs of detainees, with GEO’s profits flowing from abusing this cheap detainee labor.”

The judge’s ruling could encourage similar lawsuits against other immigrant detention centers, according to Free. That, in turn, that could have significant implications for President Donald Trump’s immigration enforcement plans. Trump’s immigration executive orders require the dramatic expansion of immigrant detention. And upward of 65 percent of immigrants currently being detained are held in facilities managed by private prison companies, including GEO Group. The lawsuit could potentially force those companies to spend more on cleaning services—paying detainees or outside employees the minimum wage to clean their facilities—which could reduce their profit margins. And that could ultimately make immigrant detention more expensive or less profitable.

George Takei Remembrance Day

noreply@blogger.com (Karen S. Cole) — Sun, 19 Feb 2017 01:57:00 +0000

George Takei: On this Remembrance Day, I hear terrible echoes of the past

By George Takei

Updated 5:58 PM ET, Sat February 18, 2017

Story highlights:

George Takei recalls his family being taken by soldiers from their home in LA and forced to live in an internment camp in 1942.

Sunday is the 75th anniversary of FDR's (President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's) executive order that allowed this discrimination against Japanese-Americans, he says.

Takei: As Trump crafts orders to single out Muslims and immigrants, Americans must not stand for this echo from the past.

Editor's Note from CNN: George Takei is an actor and activist. His Broadway show "Allegiance" screens across cinemas in the United States on the Day of Remembrance, February 19. Follow him on Twitter @GeorgeTakei. The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of the author.

(CNN) I was just a child of five when soldiers marched up our driveway in a Los Angeles residential neighborhood, bayonets in hand, and pounded on our front door, ordering us out. We were permitted only what we could carry, no bedding, no pets.

I remember my mother's tears as she and our father gathered us up, with our precious few belongings in hand. She was determined to bring a sewing machine, fearful that we would need to make or mend clothes where we were headed. She wasn't sure the authorities would allow her to take that Singer machine, so she kept it a secret, even from us. She managed, however, to pack a few treats for us children for the long journey ahead.

George Takei

That was in 1942. Earlier that year, on February 19, 75 years ago this Sunday, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued an executive order, No. 9066, which set the internment into motion. On its face, the order was "neutral," authorizing the military to designate whole swaths of land as military zones, and evacuate any persons from it as they saw fit.

But behind that facade lay a much darker purpose: to tear 120,000 innocent Japanese-Americans from their homes along the West Coast and relocate them to 10 prison camps scattered throughout the United States.

It didn't matter, back then, that most of us were US citizens and had never even been to Japan. We were presumed guilty, and held without charge for four years, simply because we happened to look like the people who had bombed Pearl Harbor. For that crime, we lost our homes, our livelihoods and our freedoms.

Every year, on February 19, we Japanese-Americans honor this day as Remembrance Day, and we renew our pledge to make sure what happened to us never happens again in America. I am always amazed, and saddened, that despite our decades long efforts, so many young people today are not even aware that such a tragedy and miscarriage of justice took place here.

And I grow increasingly concerned that we are careening toward a future where such a thing would again be possible.

A few months into his campaign, Donald Trump refused to outright reject the policies and fears that underlay the internment. Instead, he suggested that it was a tough call, and that he "would have had to be there" in order to know whether it was the wrong one.

Trump ignored the inconvenient fact that not a single case of espionage or sabotage was ever proven against any internee, and that the military itself admitted that there was never any evidence to support their sweeping policy. A few months later, a top Trump surrogate went on television and suggested that the internment might actually serve as a "precedent" for another Trump policy -- the registration of Muslim-Americans in a database.

I cannot help but hear in these words terrible echoes from the past. The internment happened because of three things: fear, prejudice and a failure of political leadership. When the administration targets groups today, whether for exclusion from travel here on the basis of religion and national origin, or for deportation based on their undocumented status, I know from personal experience that these are not done, as they claim, truly in the name of national security.

No, instead they are intended to strike fear into communities, to show the muscle and "toughness" of a new president, and to divide the citizenry against itself. These are the acts of a despot, not an elected leader.

I have dedicated my life to standing against our nation's impulse toward demagoguery and tyranny by the whipped-up masses. The answer lies not just in education, but in empathy. The false narrative -- that there are those who belong here and those who do not -- is designed precisely to divorce us from the truth that we are all here and in this together.

We are an interdependent people, sharing a common bond of humanity. The most pernicious aspect of Trump's policies is thus the denial of those basic bonds and that humanity. I will not stand for it, and no people of good conscience should.

The question before us, then, on Remembrance Day is a simple one: Will America remember? The internment is not a "precedent," it is a stark and painful lesson. We will only learn from the past if we know, understand and remember it. For if we fail, we most assuredly are doomed to repeat it.

Letter From Birmingham Jail

noreply@blogger.com (Karen S. Cole) — Sun, 15 Jan 2017 13:50:00 +0000

(This was the first one. There didn't end up having to be zillions of other ones. And he was willing to die of emphysema from cigarettes, too.)

A U G U S T 1 9 6 3

Letter from Birmingham Jail

by Martin Luther King, Jr.
I think of this man as an absolutely serious version of Pagliacci, the Crying Clown. The tears of a clown when there's no one around...Smokey Robinson. They probably Raped Him when he was in one jail, one of those times. So...multiple Letters from Birmingham Jail.

Letter From Birmingham Jail 1

From the Birmingham jail, where he was imprisoned as a participant in nonviolent demonstrations against segregation, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., wrote in longhand the letter which follows. It was his response to a public statement of concern andvcaution issued by eight white religious leaders of the South. Dr. King, who was born in 1929, did his undergraduate work at Morehouse College; attended the integrated Crozer Theological Seminary in Chester, Pennsylvania, one of six black pupils among a hundred students, and the president of his class; and won a fellowship to Boston University for his Ph.D.

WHILE confined here in the Birmingham city jail, I came across your recent statement calling our present activities "unwise and untimely." Seldom, if ever, do I pause to answer criticism of my work and ideas. If I sought to answer all of the criticisms that cross my desk, my secretaries would be engaged in little else in the course of the day, and I would have no time for constructive work. But since I feel that you are men of genuine good will and your criticisms are sincerely set forth, I would like to answer your statement in what I hope will be patient and reasonable terms.

I think I should give the reason for my being in Birmingham, since you have been influenced by the argument of "outsiders coming in." I have the honor of serving as president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, an organization operating in every Southern state, with headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia. We have some eighty-five affiliate organizations all across the South, one being the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights. Whenever necessary and possible, we share staff, educational and financial resources with our affiliates. Several months ago our local affiliate here in Birmingham invited us to be on call to engage in a nonviolent direct-action program if such were deemed necessary. We readily consented, and when the hour came we lived up to our promises. So I am here, along with several members of my staff, because we were invited here. I am here because I have basic organizational ties here.

Beyond this, I am in Birmingham because injustice is here. Just as the eighth-century prophets left their little villages and carried their "thus saith the Lord" far beyond the boundaries of their hometowns; and just as the Apostle Paul left his little village of Tarsus and carried the gospel of Jesus Christ to practically every hamlet and city of the Greco-Roman world, I too am compelled to carry the gospel of freedom beyond my particular hometown. Like Paul, I must constantly respond to the Macedonian call for aid.

Moreover, I am cognizant of the interrelatedness of all communities and states. I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. Never again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial "outside agitator" idea. Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider.

You deplore the demonstrations that are presently taking place in Birmingham. But I am sorry that your statement did not express a similar concern for the conditions that brought the demonstrations into being. I am sure that each of you would want to go beyond the superficial social analyst who looks merely at effects and does not grapple with underlying causes. I would not hesitate to say that it is unfortunate that so-called demonstrations are taking place in Birmingham at this time, but I would say in more emphatic terms that it is even more unfortunate that the white power structure of this city left the Negro community with no other alternative.

IN ANY nonviolent campaign there are four basic steps: collection of the facts to determine whether injustices are alive, negotiation, self-purification, and direct action. We have gone through all of these steps in Birmingham. There can be no gainsaying of the fact that racial injustice engulfs this community. Birmingham is probably the most thoroughly segregated city in the United States. Its ugly record of police brutality is known in every section of this country. Its unjust treatment of Negroes in the courts is a notorious reality. There have been more unsolved bombings of Negro homes and churches in Birmingham than in any other city in this nation. These are the hard, brutal, and unbelievable facts. On the basis of them, Negro leaders sought to negotiate with the city fathers. But the political leaders consistently refused to engage in good-faith negotiation.

Then came the opportunity last September to talk with some of the leaders of the economic community. In these negotiating sessions certain promises were made by the merchants, such as the promise to remove the humiliating racial signs from the stores. On the basis of these promises, Reverend Shuttlesworth and the leaders of the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights agreed to call a moratorium on any type of demonstration. As the weeks and months unfolded, we realized that we were the victims of a broken promise. The signs remained. As in so many experiences of the past, we were confronted with blasted hopes, and the dark shadow of a deep disappointment settled upon us. So we had no alternative except that of preparing for direct action, whereby we would present our very bodies as a means of laying our case before the conscience of the local and national community. We were not unmindful of the difficulties involved. So we decided to go through a process of self-purification. We

Letter From Birmingham Jail 2

started having workshops on nonviolence and repeatedly asked ourselves the questions, "Are you able to accept blows without retaliating?" and "Are you able to endure the ordeals of jail?" We decided to set our direct-action program around the Easter season, realizing that, with exception of Christmas, this was the largest shopping period of the year. Knowing that a strong economic withdrawal program would be the by-product of direct action, we felt that this was the best time to bring pressure on the merchants for the needed changes. Then it occurred to us that the March election was ahead, and so we speedily decided to postpone action until after election day. When we discovered that Mr. Conner was in the runoff, we decided again to postpone action so that the demonstration could not be used to cloud the issues. At this time we agreed to begin our nonviolent witness the day after the runoff.

This reveals that we did not move irresponsibly into direct action. We, too, wanted to see Mr. Conner defeated, so we went through postponement after postponement to aid in this community need. After this we felt that direct action could be delayed no longer.

You may well ask, "Why direct action, why sit-ins, marches, and so forth? Isn't negotiation a better path?" You are exactly right in your call for negotiation. Indeed, this is the purpose of direct action. Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and establish such creative tension that a community that has consistently refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored. I just referred to the creation of tension as a part of the work of the nonviolent resister. This may sound rather shocking. But I must confess that I am not afraid of the word "tension." I have earnestly worked and preached against violent tension, but there is a type of constructive nonviolent tension that is necessary for growth. Just as Socrates felt that it was necessary to create a tension in the mind so that individuals could rise from the bondage of myths and half-truths to the unfettered realm of creative analysis and objective appraisal, we must see the need of having nonviolent gadflies to create the kind of tension in society that will help men to rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism to the majestic heights of understanding and brotherhood. So, the purpose of direct action is to create a situation so crisis-packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation. We therefore concur with you in your call for negotiation. Too long has our beloved Southland been bogged down in the tragic attempt to live in monologue rather than dialogue.

One of the basic points in your statement is that our acts are untimely. Some have asked, "Why didn't you give the new administration time to act?" The only answer that I can give to this inquiry is that the new administration must be prodded about as much as the outgoing one before it acts. We will be sadly mistaken if we feel that the election of Mr. Boutwell will bring the millennium to Birmingham. While Mr. Boutwell is much more articulate and gentle than Mr. Conner, they are both segregationists, dedicated to the task of maintaining the status quo. The hope I see in Mr. Boutwell is that he will be reasonable enough to see the futility of massive resistance to desegregation. But he will not see this without pressure from the devotees of civil rights. My friends, I must say to you that we have not made a single gain in civil rights without determined legal and nonviolent pressure. History is the long and tragic story of the fact that privileged groups seldom give up their privileges voluntarily. Individuals may see the moral light and voluntarily give up their unjust posture; but, as Reinhold Niebuhr has reminded us, groups are more immoral than individuals.

We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed. Frankly, I have never yet engaged in a direct-action movement that was "well timed" according to the timetable of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation. For years now I have heard the word "wait." It rings in the ear of every Negro with a piercing familiarity. This "wait" has almost always meant "never." It has been a tranquilizing thalidomide, relieving the emotional stress for a moment, only to give birth to an ill-formed infant of frustration. We must come to see with the distinguished jurist of yesterday that "justice too long delayed is justice denied." We have waited for more than three hundred and forty years for our God-given and constitutional rights. The nations of Asia and Africa are moving with jetlike speed toward the goal of political independence, and we still creep at horse-and-buggy pace toward the gaining of a cup of coffee at a lunch counter. I guess it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say "wait." But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate-filled policemen curse, kick, brutalize, and even kill your black brothers and sisters with impunity; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six-year-old daughter why she cannot go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her little eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see the depressing clouds of inferiority begin to form in her little mental sky, and see her begin to distort her little personality by unconsciously developing a bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five-year-old son asking in agonizing pathos, "Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?"; when you take a cross-country drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading "white" and "colored"; when your first name becomes "nigger" and your middle name becomes "boy" (however old you are) and your last name becomes "John," and when your wife and mother are never given the respected title "Mrs."; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never knowing what to expect next, and plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of "nobodyness" -- then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait. There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over and men are no longer willing to be plunged into an abyss of injustice where they experience the bleakness of corroding despair. I hope, sirs, you can understand our legitimate and unavoidable impatience.

Letter From Birmingham Jail 3

YOU express a great deal of anxiety over our willingness to break laws. This is certainly a legitimate concern. Since we so diligently urge people to obey the Supreme Court's decision of 1954 outlawing segregation in the public schools, it is rather strange and paradoxical to find us consciously breaking laws. One may well ask, "How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?" The answer is found in the fact that there are two types of laws: there are just laws, and there are unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that "An unjust law is no law at all."

Now, what is the difference between the two? How does one determine when a law is just or unjust? A just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law, or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. To put it in the terms of St. Thomas Aquinas, an unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal and natural law. Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust. All segregation statutes are unjust because segregation distorts the soul and damages the personality. It gives the segregator a false sense of superiority and the segregated a false sense of inferiority. To use the words of Martin Buber, the great Jewish philosopher, segregation substitutes an "I - it" relationship for the "I - thou" relationship and ends up relegating persons to the status of things. So segregation is not only politically, economically, and sociologically unsound, but it is morally wrong and sinful. Paul Tillich has said that sin is separation. Isn't segregation an existential expression of man's tragic separation, an expression of his awful estrangement, his terrible sinfulness? So I can urge men to obey the 1954 decision of the Supreme Court because it is morally right, and I can urge them to disobey segregation ordinances because they are morally wrong.

Let us turn to a more concrete example of just and unjust laws. An unjust law is a code that a majority inflicts on a minority that is not binding on itself. This is difference made legal. On the other hand, a just law is a code that a majority compels a minority to follow, and that it is willing to follow itself. This is sameness made legal.

Let me give another explanation. An unjust law is a code inflicted upon a minority which that minority had no part in enacting or creating because it did not have the unhampered right to vote. Who can say that the legislature of Alabama which set up the segregation laws was democratically elected? Throughout the state of Alabama all types of conniving methods are used to prevent Negroes from becoming registered voters, and there are some counties without a single Negro registered to vote, despite the fact that the Negroes constitute a majority of the population. Can any law set up in such a state be considered democratically structured?

These are just a few examples of unjust and just laws. There are some instances when a law is just on its face and unjust in its application. For instance, I was arrested Friday on a charge of parading without a permit. Now, there is nothing wrong with an ordinance which requires a permit for a parade, but when the ordinance is used to preserve segregation and to deny citizens the

First Amendment privilege of peaceful assembly and peaceful protest, then it becomes unjust. Of course, there is nothing new about this kind of civil disobedience. It was seen sublimely in the refusal of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego to obey the laws of Nebuchadnezzar because a higher moral law was involved. It was practiced superbly by the early Christians, who were willing to face hungry lions and the excruciating pain of chopping blocks before submitting to certain unjust laws of the Roman Empire. To a degree, academic freedom is a reality today because Socrates practiced civil disobedience.

We can never forget that everything Hitler did in Germany was "legal" and everything the Hungarian freedom fighters did in Hungary was "illegal." It was "illegal" to aid and comfort a Jew in Hitler's Germany. But I am sure that if I had lived in Germany during that time, I would have aided and comforted my Jewish brothers even though it was illegal. If I lived in a Communist country today where certain principles dear to the Christian faith are suppressed, I believe I would openly advocate disobeying these anti-religious laws.

I MUST make two honest confessions to you, my Christian and Jewish brothers. First, I must confess that over the last few years. I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizens Councillor or the Ku Klux Klanner but the white moderate who is more devoted to order than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says, "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I can't agree with your methods of direct action"; who paternalistically feels that he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by the myth of time; and who constantly advises the Negro to wait until a "more convenient season." Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.

In your statement you asserted that our actions, even though peaceful, must be condemned because they precipitate violence. But can this assertion be logically made? Isn't this like condemning the robbed man because his possession of money precipitated the evil act of robbery? Isn't this like condemning Socrates because his unswerving commitment to truth and his philosophical delvings precipitated the misguided popular mind to make him drink the hemlock? Isn't this like condemning Jesus because His unique God-consciousness and never-ceasing devotion to His will precipitated the evil act of crucifixion? We must come to see, as federal courts have consistently affirmed, that it is immoral to urge an individual to withdraw his efforts to gain his basic constitutional rights because the quest precipitates violence. Society must protect the robbed and punish the robber.

Letter From Birmingham Jail 4

I had also hoped that the white moderate would reject the myth of time. I received a letter this morning from a white brother in Texas which said, "All Christians know that the colored people will receive equal rights eventually, but is it possible that you are in too great of a religious hurry? It has taken Christianity almost 2000 years to accomplish what it has. The teachings of Christ

take time to come to earth." All that is said here grows out of a tragic misconception of time. It is the strangely irrational notion that there is something in the very flow of time that will inevitably cure all ills. Actually, time is neutral. It can be used either destructively or constructively. I am coming to feel that the people of ill will have used time much more effectively than the people of good will. We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the vitriolic words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people. We must come to see that human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability. It comes through the tireless efforts and persistent work of men willing to be coworkers with God, and without this hard work time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation.

YOU spoke of our activity in Birmingham as extreme. At first I was rather disappointed that fellow clergymen would see my nonviolent efforts as those of an extremist. I started thinking about the fact that I stand in the middle of two opposing forces in the Negro community. One is a force of complacency made up of Negroes who, as a result of long years of oppression, have been so completely drained of self-respect and a sense of "somebodyness" that they have adjusted to segregation, and, on the other hand, of a few Negroes in the middle class who, because of a degree of academic and economic security and because at points they profit by segregation, have unconsciously become insensitive to the problems of the masses. The other force is one of bitterness and hatred and comes perilously close to advocating violence. It is expressed in the various black nationalist groups
that are springing up over the nation, the largest and best known being Elijah Muhammad's Muslim movement. This movement is nourished by the contemporary frustration over the continued existence of racial discrimination. It is made up of people who have lost faith in America, who have absolutely repudiated Christianity, and who have concluded that the white man is an incurable devil. I have tried to stand between these two forces, saying that we need not follow the do-nothingism of the complacent or the hatred and despair of the black nationalist. There is a more excellent way, of love and nonviolent protest. I'm grateful to God that, through the Negro church, the dimension of nonviolence entered our struggle. If this philosophy had not emerged, I am convinced that by now many streets of the South would be flowing with floods of blood. And I am further convinced that if our white brothers dismiss as "rabble-rousers" and "outside agitators" those of us who are working through the channels of nonviolent direct action and refuse to support our nonviolent efforts, millions of Negroes, out of frustration and despair, will seek solace and security in black nationalist ideologies, a development that will lead inevitably to a frightening racial nightmare.

Oppressed people cannot remain oppressed forever. The urge for freedom will eventually come. This is what has happened to the American Negro. Something within has reminded him of his birthright of freedom; something without has reminded him that he can gain it. Consciously and unconsciously, he has been swept in by what the Germans call the Zeitgeist, and with his black brothers of Africa and his brown and yellow brothers of Asia, South America, and the Caribbean, he is moving with a sense of cosmic urgency toward the promised land of racial justice. Recognizing this vital urge that has engulfed the Negro community, one should readily understand public demonstrations. The Negro has many pent-up resentments and latent frustrations. He has to get them out. So let him march sometime; let him have his prayer pilgrimages to the city hall; understand why he must have sitins and freedom rides. If his repressed emotions do not come out in these nonviolent ways, they will come out in ominous expressions of violence. This is not a threat; it is a fact of history. So I have not said to my people, "Get rid of your discontent."

But I have tried to say that this normal and healthy discontent can be channeled through the creative outlet of nonviolent direct action. Now this approach is being dismissed as extremist. I must admit that I was initially disappointed in being so categorized.

But as I continued to think about the matter, I gradually gained a bit of satisfaction from being considered an extremist. Was not Jesus an extremist in love? -- "Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, pray for them that despitefully use you." Was not Amos an extremist for justice? -- "Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream." Was not Paul an extremist for the gospel of Jesus Christ? -- "I bear in my body the marks of the Lord Jesus." Was not Martin Luther an extremist?

-- "Here I stand; I can do no other so help me God." Was not John Bunyan an extremist? -- "I will stay in jail to the end of my days before I make a mockery of my conscience." Was not Abraham Lincoln an extremist? -- "This nation cannot survive half slave and half free." Was not Thomas Jefferson an extremist? -- "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal." So the question is not whether we will be extremist, but what kind of extremists we will be. Will we be extremists for hate, or will we be extremists for love? Will we be extremists for the preservation of injustice, or will we be extremists for the cause of justice?

I had hoped that the white moderate would see this. Maybe I was too optimistic. Maybe I expected too much. I guess I should have realized that few members of a race that has oppressed another race can understand or appreciate the deep groans and passionate yearnings of those that have been oppressed, and still fewer have the vision to see that injustice must be rooted out by strong, persistent, and determined action. I am thankful, however, that some of our white brothers have grasped the meaning of this social revolution and committed themselves to it. They are still all too small in quantity, but they are big in quality. Some, like Ralph McGill, Lillian Smith, Harry Golden, and James Dabbs, have written about our struggle in eloquent, prophetic, and understanding terms. Others have marched with us down nameless streets of the South. They sat in with us at lunch counters and rode in with us on the freedom rides. They have languished in filthy roach-infested jails, suffering the abuse and brutality of angry policemen who see them as "dirty nigger lovers." They, unlike many of their moderate brothers, have recognized the urgency of the moment and sensed the need for powerful "action" antidotes to combat the disease of segregation.

Letter From Birmingham Jail 5

LET me rush on to mention my other disappointment. I have been disappointed with the white church and its leadership. Of course, there are some notable exceptions. I am not unmindful of the fact that each of you has taken some significant stands on this issue. I commend you, Reverend Stallings, for your Christian stand this past Sunday in welcoming Negroes to your Baptist Church worship service on a nonsegregated basis. I commend the Catholic leaders of this state for integrating Springhill College several years ago.

But despite these notable exceptions, I must honestly reiterate that I have been disappointed with the church. I do not say that as one of those negative critics who can always find something wrong with the church. I say it as a minister of the gospel who loves the church, who was nurtured in its bosom, who has been sustained by its Spiritual blessings, and who will remain true to it as long as the cord of life shall lengthen.

I had the strange feeling when I was suddenly catapulted into the leadership of the bus protest in Montgomery several years ago that we would have the support of the white church. I felt that the white ministers, priests, and rabbis of the South would be some of our strongest allies. Instead, some few have been outright opponents, refusing to understand the freedom movement and misrepresenting its leaders; all too many others have been more cautious than courageous and have remained silent behind the anesthetizing security of stained-glass windows.

In spite of my shattered dreams of the past, I came to Birmingham with the hope that the white religious leadership of this community would see the justice of our cause and with deep moral concern serve as the channel through which our just grievances could get to the power structure. I had hoped that each of you would understand. But again I have been disappointed.

I have heard numerous religious leaders of the South call upon their worshipers to comply with a desegregation decision because it is the law, but I have longed to hear white ministers say, follow this decree because integration is morally right and the Negro is your brother. In the midst of blatant injustices inflicted upon the Negro, I have watched white churches stand on the sidelines and merely mouth pious irrelevancies and sanctimonious trivialities. In the midst of a mighty struggle to rid our nation of racial and economic injustice, I have heard so many ministers say, "Those are social issues which the gospel has nothing to do with," and I have watched so many churches commit themselves to a completely otherworldly religion which made a strange distinction between bodies and souls, the sacred and the secular.

There was a time when the church was very powerful. It was during that period that the early Christians rejoiced when they were deemed worthy to suffer for what they believed. In those days the church was not merely a thermometer that recorded the ideas and principles of popular opinion; it was the thermostat that transformed the mores of society. Wherever the early Christians entered a town the power structure got disturbed and immediately sought to convict them for being "disturbers of the peace" and "outside agitators." But they went on with the conviction that they were "a colony of heaven" and had to obey God rather than man. They were small in number but big in commitment. They were too God-intoxicated to be "astronomically intimidated."

They brought an end to such ancient evils as infanticide and gladiatorial contest. Things are different now. The contemporary church is so often a weak, ineffectual voice with an uncertain sound. It is so often the arch supporter of the status quo. Far from being disturbed by the presence of the church, the power structure of the average community is consoled by the church's often vocal sanction of things as they are.

But the judgment of God is upon the church as never before. If the church of today does not recapture the sacrificial spirit of the early church, it will lose its authentic ring, forfeit the loyalty of millions, and be dismissed as an irrelevant social club with no meaning for the twentieth century. I meet young people every day whose disappointment with the church has risen to outright disgust.

I hope the church as a whole will meet the challenge of this decisive hour. But even if the church does not come to the aid of justice, I have no despair about the future. I have no fear about the outcome of our struggle in Birmingham, even if our motives are presently misunderstood. We will reach the goal of freedom in Birmingham and all over the nation, because the goal of America is freedom. Abused and scorned though we may be, our destiny is tied up with the destiny of America. Before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth, we were here. Before the pen of Jefferson scratched across the pages of history the majestic word of the Declaration of Independence, we were here. For more than two centuries our foreparents labored here without wages; they made cotton king; and they built the homes of their masters in the midst of brutal injustice and shameful humiliation -- and yet out of a bottomless vitality our people continue to thrive and develop. If the inexpressible cruelties of slavery could not stop us, the opposition we now face will surely fail. We will win our freedom because the sacred heritage of our nation and the eternal will of God are embodied in our echoing demands.

I must close now. But before closing I am impelled to mention one other point in your statement that troubled me profoundly. You warmly commended the Birmingham police force for keeping "order" and "preventing violence." I don't believe you would have so warmly commended the police force if you had seen its angry violent dogs literally biting six unarmed, nonviolent Negroes. I don't believe you would so quickly commend the policemen if you would observe their ugly and inhuman treatment of Negroes here in the city jail; if you would watch them push and curse old Negro women and young Negro girls; if you would see them slap and kick old Negro men and young boys, if you would observe them, as they did on two occasions, refusing to give us food because we wanted to sing our grace together. I'm sorry that I can't join you in your praise for the police department.

Letter From Birmingham Jail 6

It is true that they have been rather disciplined in their public handling of the demonstrators. In this sense they have been publicly "nonviolent." But for what purpose? To preserve the evil system of segregation. Over the last few years I have consistently preached that nonviolence demands that the means we use must be as pure as the ends we seek. So I have tried to make it clear that it is wrong to use immoral means to attain moral ends. But now I must affirm that it is just as wrong, or even more, to use moral means to preserve immoral ends.

I wish you had commended the Negro demonstrators of Birmingham for their sublime courage, their willingness to suffer, and their amazing discipline in the midst of the most inhuman provocation. One day the South will recognize its real heroes. They will be the James Merediths, courageously and with a majestic sense of purpose facing jeering and hostile mobs and the agonizing loneliness that characterizes the life of the pioneer. They will be old, oppressed, battered Negro women, symbolized in a seventy-two-year-old woman of Montgomery, Alabama, who rose up with a sense of dignity and with her people decided not to ride the segregated buses, and responded to one who inquired about her tiredness with ungrammatical profundity, "My feets is tired, but my soul is rested." They will be young high school and college students, young ministers of the gospel and a host of their elders courageously and nonviolently sitting in at lunch counters and willingly going to jail for conscience's sake. One day the South will know that when these disinherited children of God sat down at lunch counters they were in reality standing up for the best in the American dream and the most sacred values in our Judeo-Christian heritage.

Never before have I written a letter this long -- or should I say a book? I'm afraid that it is much too long to take your precious time. I can assure you that it would have been much shorter if I had been writing from a comfortable desk, but what else is there to do when you are alone for days in the dull monotony of a narrow jail cell other than write long letters, think strange thoughts, and pray long prayers?

If I have said anything in this letter that is an understatement of the truth and is indicative of an unreasonable impatience, I beg you to forgive me. If I have said anything in this letter that is an overstatement of the truth and is indicative of my having a patience that makes me patient with anything less than brotherhood, I beg God to forgive me.

Yours for the cause of Peace and Brotherhood,

MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Copyright © 1963, Martin Luther King, Jr. All rights reserved.

The Atlantic Monthly; August 1963; The Negro Is Your Brother; Volume 212, No. 2; pages 78 - 88.

I helped ghostwrite "The Boys of Birmingham". First book to give the full story on how the FBI in Birmingham, Alabama, caught Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s killer. The Assassination Investigation of the Century, lasting all of two months, and some history of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). It's on sale on Amazon, under the title and the name P. L.Ryan.

Trump Muslim Database

noreply@blogger.com (Karen S. Cole) — Mon, 09 Jan 2017 02:42:00 +0000

Trump says we’ve known his Muslim ban and database plans ‘all along.’ But we still don’t — not really.

By Aaron Blake December 21, 2016

Questions over the idea of creating a database of Muslim immigrants are coming up as President-elect Donald Trump forms his new administration. A Trump surrogate defended the idea on Fox News, saying the treatment of Japanese Americans during WWII was "precedent."(The Washington Post)

President-elect Donald Trump called Monday's attacks in Europe "terrible" as he spoke to reporters at Mar-a-Lago on Wednesday. One reporter asked Trump if the assassination of Russia's ambassador to Turkey caused him to "rethink" his policy on immigration and a ban on Muslims. "You've known my plans all along, and I've been proven to be right," Trump said.(Reuters)

Update: President-elect Trump offered his latest oblique statement about how his administration might register Muslims or ban Muslim immigrants on Wednesday, telling reporters when asked about a Muslim ban or registry, "You've known my plans all along" and adding, "I've been proven to be right. 100 percent correct" in response to attacks in Berlin and Turkey.

It's just the latest opaque comment from Trump on this topic. Last month, we looked at his evolution on the issue after one of his potential attorneys general spoke about instituting some kind of database. That post is below, with the new comments at the bottom.

The idea of a so-called Muslim registry or Muslim database has been back in the news in recent days after a pair of high-profile Donald Trump supporters rekindled it.

Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach — formerly rumored to be a candidate for Trump's attorney general — talked to Reuters on Tuesday about the Trump administration implementing one. By Wednesday, Trump surrogate Carl Higbie cited Japanese American internment camps during World War II as “precedent” for doing such a thing.

But it's worth noting how this idea evolved over the course of Trump's campaign.

What Kobach and Higbie are talking about is actually less far-reaching than the Muslim database that Trump suggested he might support as a candidate. They are talking about a registry for immigrants from Muslim countries — similar to one Kobach helped implement as a staff member in the George W. Bush Justice Department and that was scrapped in 2011 — but Trump at times expressed an openness to a database for all Muslims in the United States.

[Just so you know: The government already has a list of Muslims in the U.S.]

The idea for both versions is basically that radical Islam poses such a threat that Muslims — irrespective of their potential ties to extremism — should be on some kind of registry so they can be tracked.

Trump has not stated clearly exactly what he favors, and he has even disputed reports that he supported the broader version of the Muslim database. His campaign released a statement late Thursday stating, "President-elect Trump has never advocated for any registry or system that tracks individuals based on their religion, and to imply otherwise is completely false."

But he has also pointedly declined to rule it out and has at times talked about implementing just such a system.

In other words, as with many policies he might push as president, we just don't know exactly what he'll do — until he steps forward and says it himself. And he has offered plenty of conflicting signals.

So how did we get to this point? And what exactly has Trump said? Let's recap.

A noncommittal start

Almost exactly one year ago, on Nov. 19, 2015, Trump was asked by a Yahoo News reporter what measures he might take when it came to his stated proposal to increase surveillance of Muslims in the United States.

“We’re going to have to do certain things that were frankly unthinkable a year ago,” Trump said. Asked about registering Muslims in a database or noting their religion on IDs, Trump responded: “We’re going to have to look at a lot of things very closely. We’re going to have to look at the mosques. We’re going to have to look very, very carefully.”

Asked the following day again whether he supported a Muslim database, Trump was again oblique: “There should be a lot of systems — beyond databases. I mean, we should have a lot of systems.” Trump then began talking about a border wall.

Leaning in

The MSNBC reporter followed up: “But that’s something your White House would like to implement?”

Trump responded: “I would certainly implement that. Absolutely.”

It wasn't clear whether the “that” he was referring to was a database or “a lot of systems” or a border wall. But the reporter then asked how he would register people, and Trump's responses suggested that he supported a database.

“It would just be good management,” he said. When asked whether they would be required to register, he responded: “They have to be — they have to be. Let me just tell you: The key is people can come to the country, but they have to come legally.”

Trump disputes it — somewhat

Later that same day, Trump disputed the reports saying he had endorsed a Muslim database, but he still didn't say he disagreed with it.

Still later that day, though, Trump again left open the possibility. Asked on Fox News Channel whether he would support a “full Muslim database,” he said: “Basically the suggestion was made and [is] certainly something we should start thinking about. … But certainly I would want to have a database for the refugees — for the Syrian refugees that are coming in, because nobody knows where they're coming from.”

The database is 'all right' and 'okay'

The following day in Alabama, Trump seemed to lean in more toward some kind of a database, saying it would be “all right” and “okay” but again quibbled with the idea that it was a big deal.

“So the database — I said yeah, that’s all right, fine,” he said. “But they also said the wall, and I said the wall, and I was referring to the wall. But database is okay, and watch list is okay, and surveillance is okay. ... And the biggest story yesterday — the biggest — was 'Trump wants database on Muslims.’ I said, 'What's all happening here?'”

A day later, Trump again left open the possibility. Asked by ABC News if he would rule out a database on all Muslims, he said no, but then shifted to talking about a database just of refugees.

“No, not at all,” he said. “I want a database for the refugees that — if they come into the country. We have no idea who these people are. When the Syrian refugees are going to start pouring into this country, we don't know if they're ISIS, we don't know if it's a Trojan horse.

“And I definitely want a database and other checks and balances. We want to go with watch lists. We want to go with databases. And we have no choice.”

The issue was soon overshadowed by Trump's proposal in December to ban all Muslim immigration — which he may or may not have walked back since then. And in an anti-terrorism speech in June, he made no mention of a database or registry.

But judging from these comments, it's little surprise that the Trump transition team is looking at some kind of database involving Muslims or Muslim countries. The real question from here is how far they take the idea.

'You've known my plans all along'

In a very brief Q&A session with reporters, this exchange occurred:

QUESTION: [Have the attacks in Berlin and Turkey] caused you to rethink your reevaluate your plans to create a Muslim registry or ban Muslim immigration to the United States?
TRUMP: You've known my plans all along. I've been proven to be right -- 100 percent correct.

The latter statement is debatable. The former is just not the case.

Trump Muslim Registry

noreply@blogger.com (Karen S. Cole) — Mon, 02 Jan 2017 12:57:00 +0000

Trump Camp’s Talk of Registry and Japanese Internment Raises Muslims’ Fears

By JONAH ENGEL BROMWICHNOV. 17, 2016

President-elect Donald Trump's team said today that he had never advocated for "any registry or system that tracks individuals based on their religion" -- despite statements in the past that may be at odds with that.

“President-elect Trump has never advocated for any registry or system that tracks individuals based on their religion, and to imply otherwise is completely false," Jason Miller, Communications Director of the Presidential Transition Team, wrote in a statement. "The national registry of foreign visitors from countries with high terrorism activity that was in place during the Bush and Obama Administrations gave intelligence and law enforcement communities additional tools to keep our country safe the President-elect will release his own vetting policies after he is sworn in."

In an interview with NBC News last November, Trump was asked: "is there going to be a database that tracks the Muslims here in this country?"

The remarks were made after a rally, and there was speculation by some on social media afterwards that Trump did not hear the entirety of the question, because he refers to the border in his answer.

"There should be a lot of systems, beyond database, we should have a lot of systems, and today you can do it," Trump responds. "But right now we have to have a border, we have to have strength, we have to have a wall. And we cannot let what’s happening to this country happen."

"But that's something your White House would like to implement?" the reporter presses.

"Oh I would certainly implement that. Absolutely." Trump answers.

But Trump continues to talk about the logistics of implementing such a database at length.

"But for Muslims specifically, how do you actually get them registered in a database?" the reporter asks. Trump responds: "It would be just good management. What you have to do is good management procedures and we can do that."

He also responds to a question about going to mosques to "sign these people up." "Different places, you sign them up at different, but it’s all about management, our country has no management," Trump says.

Trump tweeted afterwards that he didn’t suggest the idea of a database -- but did not retract his response.

In an interview with Yahoo News in November 2015, Trump did not rule out the idea of a database or a special form of identification for Muslims.

Trump was asked if that would include “registering Muslims in a database or giving them a form of special identification that noted their religion.”

Trump did not say yes or no, instead saying: “We’re going to have to look at a lot of things very closely We’re going to have to look at the mosques. We’re going to have to look very, very carefully.”

The Des Moines register subsequently asked about the Yahoo interview.

The report says the first time Trump was asked about his remarks, he said: "I certainly wouldn’t want to do it but we have to be vigilant, we have to be very careful."

The second time he was asked, according to the Register, Trump responded that he had never heard of such a thing. “I didn’t say that. I never said that,” he said, according to the Register.

ABC News' Katherine Faulders and Alex Mallin contributed reporting.

Cannibalism in Death Camps

noreply@blogger.com (Karen S. Cole) — Mon, 02 Jan 2017 12:23:00 +0000

Newly-Released Documents Describe 'Rampant' Cannibalism at Nazi Concentration Camps

We have them in America. They are called Wendigos, sort of like Wendy's Old Fashioned hamburgers. Well, laugh away, but be careful with whom you associate. Do be intelligent if you value your life. If not, well...go there.

By VICE News

March 31, 2016 | 5:25 am

Cannibalism, drowning, and crucifixion: just some of the horrors described in first-hand accounts of British people's experiences at the hands of the Nazis during World War Two which were released on Thursday in the UK.

The long-sealed testimonies — contained in applications that UK nationals made to a Anglo-German Nazi Persecution Compensation scheme between 1964 and 1965 — also reveal the struggle of many of those who suffered to meet the strict criteria necessary to get remuneration.

Out of 4,206 people who applied for compensation, only 1,015 were successful. Many were subjected to months or even years of questioning about their experiences or backgrounds before being refused.

The accounts given included one from Harold Le Druillenec, who was the only British survivor of Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where he was imprisoned for 10 months. Le Druillenec went on to give evidence at the Belsen Trials.

He wrote: "All my time here was spent in heaving dead bodies into the mass graves kindly dug for us by 'outside workers' for we no longer had the strength for that type of work which, fortunately, must have been observed by the camp authorities.

"Jungle law reigned among the prisoners; at night you killed or were killed; by day cannibalism was rampant.

"The bulk of Auschwitz had been transferred to Belsen when I arrived and it was here that I heard the expression: 'There is only one way out of here — through the chimney,'" he said, referring to the crematorium and gas chambers.

He recalled different "means of putting inmates to death includ[ing] beating, drowning, crucifixion, hanging in various stances etc," and said attempted suicide "was a major crime for the choice of means of death was not ours, and as there was no privacy at all I cannot recall a single successful suicide." More than 70,000 people died at the Bergen-Belsen camp between 1941 and 1945.

Le Druillenec lost half his body weight during his imprisonment and suffered the aftereffects of dysentery, scabies, malnutrition, and septicaemia for almost a year after his release. He eventually was awarded compensation to the value of £1,835 (around £30,000 or $43,000 today) by the Foreign Office.

One applicant, Albert Slack, was a private in the 4th Royal Berkshire regiment when he was taken prisoner in May 1940 and imprisoned in various camps, including the Theresienstadt (Terezin) concentration camp, where he was forced to dig graves. After being freed and returning home he was "hard to get on with" and his family did not want anything to do with him, according to his file. He was awarded £340 (worth around £6,000 or $8,625 today) in compensation for the loss of a finger.

Those who were refused compensation included Lieutenant Bertram James, a British officer who was involved in the celebrated "great escape" from the Luftwaffe-run prisoner-of-war camp Stalag Luft III. James was told by UK officials that he did not suffer "the inhuman and degrading treatment of a concentration camp proper." His case was later picked up by the British parliament and press, and eventually he received £1,192 (worth around £21,600 / $31,000 today).

Another person refused compensation was naturalized Briton Elizabeth Spira, who was imprisoned at a Czech camp at Theresienstadt. She described horrible scenes at that camp, where she said children "could not eat for fear [of] what we will do with them, as they had seen their parents never came out any more."

She said: "We tried to clean [the children] in the bathhouse. They refused to go in and they held on to the door handle, when we tried to carry them in. In the end, I took the smallest child, we went into the bathhouse, gave [the child] a good hot bath... soon [the children] recovered completely only to be sent back... to be gassed."

The money was awarded from a pot of £1 million ($1.44 million) given to the UK by the German government for victims of Nazi persecution — which was defined by the UK Foreign Office as "illegal detention in a concentration camp or comparable place for the purpose of the infliction of deliberate and organised suffering, torture, or extermination in furtherance of Nazi ideology."

Criteria used included physical disability resulting from the detention and how long the person had been held.

Many applicants were refused because they were either not British citizens at the time of the persecution or held dual nationality. Others were refused because they were soldiers and thus legally interned as prisoners of war, or because the Foreign Office deemed them to have experienced a case of suffering, but not persecution.

Follow VICE News on Twitter: @vicenews

TOPICS: nazis, europe, germany, world war two, concentration camps, bergen-belsen, second world war, war & conflict, prisoners of war, britain, uk

Could Trump Camps Lead to Cannibalism?

noreply@blogger.com (Karen S. Cole) — Mon, 02 Jan 2017 12:10:00 +0000

Cannibalism in Prison Camps

EDITOR'S NOTE: The potential "end result" of what people are already doing. Honest! There were two obvious building cannibals at Center Park, where I used to live. I trained a Jewish boy to punch one of them out, it was a different large apartment building that he lived in at the time. I don't know what happened to him...

British Medical Officer's Visit to "Most Horrible Place"

With the British Army, April 18

General Dempsey's senior medical officer said to-day that the Belsen prison camp near Bremen, with its thousands of typhus, typhoid, and tuberculosis cases, was "the most horrible, frightful place" he had ever seen. Here are some of the things he saw:

There was a pile - between sixty to eighty yards long, thirty yards wide, and four feet high - of the unclothed bodies of women all within sight of several hundred children. Gutters were filled with rotting dead and men had come to the gutters to die, using the kerbstones as back-rests.

"The prison doctors tell me that cannibalism is going on," the medical officer said. "There was no flesh on the bodies; the liver, kidneys, and heart were knifed out. There were five to seven births daily, but there was no water."

There was bunk accommodation for only 474 women out of 1704 sickness cases. Another 18,600 women who should have been in hospital were lying on bare, bug-ridden boards. In the men's quarters there were 1,900 bunks for 2,242 acute cases with another 7,000 cases who should have been in hospital.

Photographic Record

Thousands of German prisoners have been paraded to the camp to see the conditions, the filth, disease, and death of patients of all nationalities - including four British. A photographic record of this compound of human wreckage has been made.

Before the camp was completely taken over a burst of shooting disclosed that the guards were killing prisoners trying to take potatoes from a pit in the camp.

There were 28,000 women and 11,000 men in the two sections of the overcrowded camp and about 500 children.

"The first night we put tanks round the food," the brigadier said. "Turnip soup was all the Germans gave the prisoners. The British guards had to fire over the heads of prisoners desperate to get at stores. Our first priorities were food and water.

"The next morning I drove round with the camp commandant in a jeep. He was a typical German brute - a cruel, sadistic, heavy-featured Nazi. He was quite unashamed.

"We saw compounds filled with dead and dying. There were a few plump people. They had obviously been there only a short time. One pit was choked with blackened bodies. There were several piles of unclothed dead.

"In one compound typhus cases had not been segregated. Two or three had to share a tiny bunk. The hospital was only huts set aside.

"I saw women lying on bare boards so weak they could hardly raise themselves on their arms to try and cheer as we went though.

"There were between 100 and 150 doctors - mostly women - in the camp. I mobilised them and told them my plans. One of the first things is to move all the people who are going to die.

Starved to Death

"I am told that 30,000 prisoners died in the last few months and I can well believe the figure," the Brigadier added. One of the inmates was a German professor who had made rude remarks about Hitler.

"Typhus caused far fewer deaths than starvation. Naked men and women tried to keep themselves clean with the dregs of coffee.

"Those too weak to move had no food and died. We found a consignment of Red Cross stores sent to Jewish inmates by members of their race outside. It had not been distributed.

"Children were in comparatively good condition. The women had not spared themselves to see that the children were as comfortable as possible. Medical stores were quite inadequate."

Getting food, water, medical supplies, and treatment to these mutilated thousands is one of the biggest jobs the medical personnel of General Dempsey's army has undertaken. The camp commandant is under close arrest.

Since you’re here…

…we have a small favor to ask. More people are reading the Guardian than ever but far fewer are paying for it. And advertising revenues across the media are falling fast. So you can see why we need to ask for your help. The Guardian's independent, investigative journalism takes a lot of time, money and hard work to produce. But we do it because we believe our perspective matters – because it might well be your perspective, too.

If everyone who reads our reporting, who likes it, helps to pay for it our future would be much more secure.

Become a supporter

Make a contribution

Topics

Second world war

North Korean Bomb Tests

noreply@blogger.com (Karen S. Cole) — Sat, 31 Dec 2016 19:25:00 +0000

First on CNN: North Korea may have tested components of a hydrogen bomb

By Barbara Starr, CNN Pentagon Correspondent

Updated 5:04 AM ET, Fri January 29, 2016

(CNN)The U.S. now believes North Korea might have attempted to test components of a hydrogen bomb on January 6, after further review and analysis of the latest intelligence information.

A U.S. official directly familiar with the latest U.S. assessment said there may have been a partial, failed test of some type of components associated with a hydrogen bomb.

The assessment comes after careful examination of the latest intelligence analysis of the test data. But the official emphasized there is no final conclusion.

Immediately following the test earlier this month, White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest said the initial analysis that have been conducted was "not consistent" with a successful hydrogen bomb test.

The U.S. still does not accept North Korea's claim that it tested a hydrogen bomb, but air sampling conducted after the test has proved inconclusive, the official said. That prompted another look at the seismic data.

That analysis shows the test was conducted more than two times deeper underground than originally assessed -- at a depth consistent with what might be needed for a hydrogen bomb.

However, the size of the seismic event and other intelligence indicates it was not likely a fully functioning device. The official said it's possible the North Koreans believe they conducted a full hydrogen bomb test, but the U.S. believes it was likely only some components, perhaps a detonator, that exploded.

Trump Internment Camps

noreply@blogger.com (Karen S. Cole) — Fri, 02 Dec 2016 03:56:00 +0000

'You need to back off': Van Jones, Trump supporter clash

By Josiah Ryan, CNN

November 9, 2016

Will President Trump Create Internment Camps?

(CNN) CNN's Van Jones exchanged hot words with Kayleigh McEnany on Wednesday night as the Trump supporter argued Jones ought to repudiate fears among protesters that a Trump administration would create camps for illegal immigrants.

"You should correct that fear," said McEnany. "Donald Trump has never proposed internment camps. You have to correct that fear."

"You need to back off," Jones fired back. "You need to have a little bit of empathy and understanding for people who are afraid because your candidate has been one of the most explosively provocative candidates in the history of our country."

"There is a price to be paid for that," he added.

As McEnany sought to interrupt Jones, CNN's Anderson Cooper jumped in, telling her to "let him finish."

"I am not finished," said Jones, his voice rising. "I am not going to be talked over tonight, I am not."

Jones said he was not spreading unfounded fears of internment camps but that he senses a real terror among minorities who opposed Trump.

Google the phrase GHOST WRITER INC for your Ghost Writing, Ghostwriting or Editing book, screenplay, music, freelance and contracted copy writing, and all of your writing related needs. Ghost Writer, Inc. also has top level marketers, promoters, and publishing or optioning assistance services. Visit www.rainbowriting.com (only one "w") as soon as you're done with this blog, if you are serious about your worthwhile project. We will consider doing work for non-profit organizations, if we can get a grant for ghostwriting or editing a book project, or something along those lines. Thank you for your valuable time.

George Takei Internment Camps

noreply@blogger.com (Karen S. Cole) — Fri, 18 Nov 2016 19:24:00 +0000

George Takei Blasts Trump Surrogate's Internment Camp Comments as 'Morally Bankrupt'

Actor and activist George Takei has fiercely condemned a prominent Donald Trump supporter's invocation of Japanese-American interment camps as "precedent" for a proposed national registry for immigrants from Muslim countries.

"The Japanese-American internment was an egregious violation of our national values and principles, a terrible event for which Congress apologized in 1988," Takei said in a statement released Thursday. "To invoke that dark chapter as a precedent for any action against any minorities today is a morally bankrupt and dangerous step, completely out-of-bounds with contemporary notions of civil and human rights."

Takei's statement came in response to remarks by Carl Higbie, a former spokesman for the pro-Trump organization Great America PAC, during a Wednesday appearance on the Fox News program The Kelly File.

Speaking about the proposed registry, Higbie said, "We've done it based on race, we've done it based on religion, we've done it based on region." He added, "We've done it with Iran back -- back a while ago. We did it during World War II with Japanese, which, call it what you will, may be wrong."

"Come on, you're not proposing that we go back to the days of internment camps, I hope," replied host Megyn Kelly.

"I'm not proposing that at all," Higbie said. "I'm just saying, there is precedent for it."

In addition to denouncing Higbie's comments, Takei said he will be formally inviting elected officials across the country to attend a film screening of Allegiance, the Broadway musical inspired by his own life, including his time in internment camps. As previously announced, the musical will be in theaters for one night only, Dec. 13.

"It is more important than ever that the story of the internment be told and heard," Takei said in his statement. "We must remain vigilant and mindful of our past mistakes, so that history does not repeat itself. Trump's rhetoric and plans to profile Muslims indicate that he has not learned the folly of the internment, nor the forces of fear and prejudice that propelled it."

Watch Higbie's appearance on The Kelly File here.