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And President Obama got it wrong – Elections in Nigeria
By Osita Ebiem Nigeria is going to the polls to elect a president in less than one week. Understandably, there is a high level of apprehension, hence President Obama’s intervention in calling for a fair and peaceful election. This fear has remained a permanent feature in Nigeria since the inception of the country fifty something …
03/04/15 -
Sexual violence and slavery as weapons of genocide against Yazidis
Yazidi women are being targeted as women, and as members of the Yazidi people – with the aim of destroying individuals, families and the whole community. On 3 August 2014, nineteen-year-old Yazidi woman, Seve, witnessed something no human should ever have to see – her own husband shot and killed by Islamic State of Iraq …
03/12/14 -
Rape as a mechanism of genocide in Darfur
About a month ago, Sudanese soldiers stormed into the Tabit village in Darfur, violently expelling all the men and, over a few hours, brutally raping 200 women and girls. Among the victims of rape were 80 minors, of whom 8 were elementary school students. A week after the attack, a commander in the Sudanese army …
25/11/14 -
Symposium on the Yazidi genocide
150 people attended a symposium at the “Hanoar Haoved Vehalomed” headquarters in Tel Aviv Wednesday to hear testimonies of the genocidal massacres being waged against the Yazidi people in northwest Iraq. The symposium was called Your Brother’s Blood Cries Out, a reference to the murder of Abel from Genesis 4. The keynote speakers were Dr. …
14/09/14 -
The Yazidi Genocide in Iraq
Who are the killers? ISIS, or “Islamic State,” is a genocidaire, Salafi-Jihadist Sunni organization founded after the American invasion of Iraq. It was previously known as Al-Qaeda’s subset in Iraq. The organization has been responsible for a long list of terror attacks waged against Shiites, Christians and Iraqi and Western security forces—mainly between 2007 and …
13/08/14 -
Can Mass Atrocities Be Prevented?
I would like to start where I think one should, namely at the end. The answer to the question is “yes, but with great difficulty”. Why is it so difficult? Because humans are predatory mammals: with the exception of some vegetarians, we kill other animals, and fish, in order to live. But we are weak …
25/04/14 -
The Twentieth Anniversary of the Rwanda Genocide: What has been learned?
Rwanda at twenty years Roméo Dallaire offers a number of painful, indeed excruciating observations in his searing account of the Rwandan genocide that claimed the lives of some 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus beginning on April 7, 1994. As UNIMAR commander during the months leading up to and during the genocide, Dallaire provides an almost …
07/04/14 -
Operation “human warmth”
Barak Sella’s speech in the International Holocaust Remembrance Day 2014. Teaching of the holocaust is a very integral part of an Israeli child’s education. On a things I find most memorable, is the Evian conference, in which the nations of the world decided to ignore the severe situation of the Jewish people, by refusing to …
29/01/14 -
Turkey and the Politics of Memory
Victims of genocide die twice: first in the killing fields and then in the texts of denialists who insist that “nothing happened” or that what happened was something “different”. On the eve of two centennial anniversaries in 2015 — the Gallipoli landings, and the start of the genocide of long-settled Armenians, Assyrians and Hellenes in …
08/12/13 -
Combating Denialism
There is a strategic problem with those who seek to combat Holocaust and genocide denialism. The traditional academic response is to use reason and learning to educate the denialist out of his or her stance. It never works — because both “sides”, in what is wrongly called “the debate”, start from different premises. Several decades …
08/12/13