War Crimes, Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity

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    Athens Democracy Forum: Seeking the Road to Peace in the Middle East

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    Panelists at the Athens Democracy Forum discussed the widening conflict and the challenge of getting the warring parties to a consensus.This article is from a special report on the Athens Democracy Forum, which gathered experts last week in the Greek capital to discuss global issues.As the war in the Middle East faced another round of deadly escalation, the international negotiator Nomi Bar-Yaacov called on all sides in the conflict to stop and consider how “we got here.”An Israeli citizen and associate fellow at the London-based think tank Chatham House, she didn’t hesitate to give her own answer.“At the heart of this lies the right of the Palestinians to self-determination and to statehood,” Ms. Bar-Yaacov said, leading off a sometimes-edgy 40-minute panel discussion on the Middle East at the Athens Democracy Forum last week.In recent days, the heightened confrontation between Israel and Iran has exacerbated fears in the region and globally about an even larger and more dangerous conflict.And yet, the decades-long Israeli-Palestinian conflict was what started the current war, just as it has other Middle East wars before it. And most of the panelists agreed that the most feasible path to peace would be the two-state solution that has been on and off the table since Israel was created.“Nobody in 76 years has come up with a better idea,” said Roger Cohen, Paris bureau chief of The New York Times, who has reported frequently from the region.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      U.N. Sees ‘Human Rights Abyss’ in Myanmar as Military Kills Civilians

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      Three years after the military staged a coup, intensifying a civil war, civilians continue to pay the price, according to a coming United Nations report.Thousands of civilians in Myanmar have been “killed at the hands of the military,” the United Nations said on Tuesday, including hundreds who have died from torture and neglect in the junta’s prisons.“Myanmar is plumbing the depths of a human rights abyss,” James Rodehaver, the head of the U.N. human rights team monitoring the crisis, told journalists. He described a vacuum in the rule of law that was being filled by summary killings, torture and sexual violence.The casualties attest to a chaotic civil war that escalated sharply after the military staged a coup in February 2021. Now, three years later, pro-democracy forces and ethnic militias are battling the junta’s soldiers in a conflict that has displaced more than three million people and left close to 19 million in need of humanitarian aid, according to the U.N.But the military’s ferocious tactics, including an ongoing campaign of airstrikes and mass arrests, also reflect its shrinking hold. The military now controls less than 40 percent of the country and is constantly losing ground to armed opposition groups, Mr. Rodehaver said.The military killed at least 2,414 civilians just between April 2023 and the end of this June, including 334 children, according to a report by the U.N. team monitoring Myanmar that it will present to the Human Rights Council next week. About half of those deaths occurred in military airstrikes or in artillery bombardments.Another 759 people died in the junta’s custody in that same time period, the U.N. report will say. And they are only a portion of those who have died in detention since the coup, according to the report. Military authorities have arrested around 27,400 people since February 2021, including some 9,000 people in the 15 months that the U.N. report covered.What’s Happening in Myanmar’s Civil War?Questions you may have about the ongoing war in Myanmar, explained with graphics.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Netanyahu’s Speech to Congress: Key Takeaways

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      Here are six takeaways from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech to U.S. lawmakers.Israel’s leader traveled some 5,000 miles and did not give an inch.Addressing a joint meeting of Congress on Wednesday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu pushed back forcefully on condemnations of Israel’s prosecution of the war in the Gaza Strip. He lavished praise and thanks on the United States for its support. And he gave scarcely a hint that a conflict that has killed tens of thousands and brought protesters out to the streets around the world — including those outside the doors of Congress on the same day as his speech — would be drawing to a close any time soon.Here are some of the highlights.He name-checked both Biden and Trump.Mr. Netanyahu was careful to walk a middle path, thanking both Democrats and Republicans, including President Biden and the Republican presidential nominee, Donald J. Trump, for their support.“I know that America has our back,” he said. “And I thank you for it. All sides of the aisle. Thank you, my friends.”Mr. Netanyahu said he had known Mr. Biden for 40 years and expressed particular appreciation for his “heartfelt support for Israel after the savage attack” on his country that was led by Hamas on Oct. 7. But he also made a point of praising Mr. Trump, who as president was more receptive to some of his expansionist policies.Mr. Netanyahu also made clear how well he knew his audience, both in the chamber in the country at large. An American university graduate, he delivered a speech fluent in English and ornamented with colloquialisms like “what in God’s green earth.”He denied that Israeli was starving Gazans.Mr. Netanyahu rejected accusations by the prosecutor at the International Criminal Court that Israel was deliberately cutting off food to the people of Gaza. “Utter, complete nonsense, a complete fabrication,” he declared.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      A Poet Goes to War

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      Deep in the sweltering jungles of Myanmar this spring, a rebel commander stood in front of 241 recruits for Day 1 of basic training. The troops — part of a resistance fighting an unpopular military dictatorship — were organized in rows by height, starting at less than five feet tall. A spotted dog patrolled the ragged lines before settling in the dirt for a snooze.The commander, Ko Maung Saungkha, has raised an army of 1,000 soldiers. But his background is not military. Instead, he is a poet, one of at least three who are leading rebel forces in Myanmar and inspiring young people to fight on the front lines of the brutal civil war.“In our revolution, we need everyone to join, even poets,” Mr. Maung Saungkha said.He amended his statement.“Especially poets,” he added.To his new recruits, though, Mr. Maung Saungkha delivered a lecture devoid of literary embellishments. The soldiers, roughly half from Yangon, the largest city in Myanmar, may have been lured by his social media presence, curated to appeal to romantic notions of resistance, or by the junta’s ordering conscription for all young men and women in the country. But no rhyming couplet — no matter how deft — would save them in battle. For that, they had to learn how to shoot and fight.The jungle simmered. Over the next few hours in Myanmar’s eastern Karen State, more than a dozen enlistees would collapse from the heat, exhaustion or simply nerves. Ko Rakkha, Mr. Maung Saungkha’s chief drill sergeant, kept the soldiers moving. Otherwise, he said, they would not be ready for the front lines in three months’ time.“Whether you’re a doctor or a lawyer or a poet, forget your past, forget your pride,” said Mr. Rakkha, himself a poet. “The point of training is to learn how not to die.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Labour Wins Back the Trust of Jewish Voters

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      From the day that Keir Starmer became the head of the Labour Party in 2020, he made repairing ties with British Jews a priority, calling antisemitism a “stain” on the party.On Thursday, many British Jews who had turned away from Labour in the 2019 general election gave the party another chance. Labour won back several North London constituencies with significant Jewish populations.Nearly half of Jewish voters planned to support the Labour Party in Thursday’s election, according to a poll of 2,717 Jewish adults who responded to the Jewish Current Affairs Survey taken in June, before the election.Britain’s 287,000 Jews make up less than 0.5 percent of the country’s population, and some of them had been politically homeless under the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour Party’s former leader, who was accused of having let antisemitism flourish within the party. Jewish support for the party under Mr. Corbyn reached a low of 11 percent in the 2019 general election, according to the Institute for Jewish Policy Research, which focuses on Jewish life in Europe.“It’s very clear that Jews have flocked back to what I think to many people has long been their natural political home,” said Jonathan Boyd, the executive director of the Institute for Jewish Policy Research, which is based in London.Sarah Sackman, the Labour candidate for the North London constituency of Finchley and Golders Green, where nearly one in five voters are Jewish, the largest proportion in Britain, was elected on Thursday. Labour candidates in the North London constituencies of Hendon, where 14 percent of voters are Jewish, and Chipping Barnet, where nearly 7 percent of voters are Jewish, also won.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Qaeda Commander at Guantánamo Bay Is Sentenced for War Crimes

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      A U.S. military jury decided on a 30-year prison term. But under a plea deal, the prisoner’s sentence will end in 2032.A U.S. military jury on Thursday ordered a former Qaeda commander to a serve a 30-year prison sentence for war crimes carried out by his insurgent forces in wartime Afghanistan in the early 2000s. The military judge excused the panel from the chamber and then announced that, under a plea agreement, the prisoner’s sentence would end in eight years.The outcome was part of the arcane system called military commissions, which allows prisoners to reach plea deals with a senior official at the Pentagon who oversees the war court but requires the formality of a jury sentencing hearing anyway.In handing down the maximum sentence, the jury of 11 officers rejected arguments by defense lawyers for Abd al-Hadi al-Iraqi that he deserved leniency, if not clemency, for his early humiliations in C.I.A. custody, subsequent cooperation with U.S. investigators and failing health.Mr. Hadi, 63, was aware of the deal that reduced his sentence to 10 years, starting with his guilty plea in June 2022. It was unclear whether victims of attacks by Mr. Hadi’s forces and their family members had been told. None of the five people who testified last week about their loss commented as they streamed out of the spectators’ gallery on Thursday morning following an at-times emotional two-week sentencing trial.The prisoner also did not appear to react when the jury foreman, a Marine colonel, announced the harshest of possible sentences. Mr. Hadi, who is disabled by a paralyzing spine disease and a series of surgeries at Guantánamo, sat in court in a padded therapeutic chair, listening through a headset providing Arabic translation.His case was an unusual one at the court, which was created to prosecute terrorism cases as war crimes after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. While prosecutors cast Mr. Hadi as a member of the Qaeda inner circle before those attacks, there was no suggestion in his plea agreement that he knew about the plot beforehand.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Battlefield Commander’s Case Goes to Guantánamo Jury

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      The panel is deciding a sentence for a prisoner who pleaded guilty to commanding Qaeda and Taliban forces in Afghanistan that carried out war crimes.A military jury on Wednesday began deliberating a sentence for an admitted war criminal at Guantánamo Bay after prosecution and defense lawyers portrayed the prisoner as, alternately, a senior member of a global Qaeda conspiracy or a battlefield commander defending Afghanistan from the U.S. invasion.Many of the U.S. officers serving on the 11-member panel are themselves veterans of the U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. How they view the crimes of the man called Abd al-Hadi al-Iraqi could influence the length of his sentence, and whether they heed his lawyer’s request to recommend clemency.The closing arguments focused on the battlefield in wartime Afghanistan, in contrast to the court’s better known cases, the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and the U.S.S. Cole bombing in 2000, which are portrayed as acts of terrorism.Mr. Hadi, 63, who was captured in 2006, pleaded guilty in 2022. Under the terms of his agreement, he is to receive a sentence in the 25- to 30-year range. But he could be released to the custody of a trusted country, if one can be found that will give him specialized care for a paralyzing spine disease that has left him disabled.Douglas J. Short, the lead prosecutor, called Mr. Hadi a “senior member of one of the most notorious conspiracies to date, Al Qaeda,” who joined the movement before the Sept. 11 attacks and did not give up the fight when the United States invaded. Mr. Short said that Mr. Hadi put civilians in harm’s way in a campaign of suicide bombings and other operations in the early 2000s in Afghanistan, when the United States was pursuing a “hearts and minds” strategy.He offered a timeline of the deaths of 17 U.S. and foreign coalition soldiers in 2003 and 2004. They were war crimes, he said, because the Taliban and Qaeda forces who carried them out blended in with the civilian population and used unorthodox methods of warfare, such as turning civilian taxis into bombs by packing them with explosives.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Choosing to Forgive Can Be Terrifying — and Healing

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      Choosing to forgive can be frightening, but it’s a powerful tool for repairing the harm done by violence, oppression and other traumas.This essay is part of a series called The Big Ideas, in which writers respond to a single question: What do we fear? You can read more by visiting The Big Ideas series page.In the years I served on South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, I came to a surprising conclusion. It crystallized when I invited the daughter of an anti-apartheid activist to the University of the Free State in Bloemfontein, where I held an endowed chair position, to speak about her encounter with the man who killed her mother. Marcia Khoza was 5 years old when her mother was murdered in a raid led by Eugene de Kock, the former head of the apartheid government’s covert hit squad operations. On the 23rd anniversary of her mother’s death, Khoza went to see de Kock in prison, carrying a book on forgiveness that she bought for him. Inside the book she wrote: “Let the power of peace and forgiveness guide you.”At the University of the Free State event, Khoza described growing up with a deepening void of emptiness. “I carried so much anger,” she said, and she let the anger intensify to protect herself “from falling into the abyss.” She wanted to meet de Kock to fill the gaps of unanswered questions about her mother’s killing, and as part of her search for inner peace, she was ready to forgive him.When I joined the commission, it seemed counterintuitive that meeting someone who has murdered a loved one could be restorative for either person. But forgiveness, I came to realize, is perhaps the most powerful means of restoring a sense of coherence and continuity in the lives of survivors of historical wrongs. It can also be an incredibly frightening concept to embrace.Noma Dumezweni, left, and Matthew Marsh perform in “A Human Being Died That Night” at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in New York. The play is based on the book of the same name, written by Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela, that examines atrocities committed by the South African police forces during apartheid.Michelle V. Agins/The New York TimesForgiveness emerges from both within and outside the place of hurt, and it requires a degree of intentional openness, of reaching out beyond oneself toward the other. Therein lies both its transformative potential and its moral ambiguity — and this is what is most frightening about forgiveness. The inward psychological journey necessary before we can forgive enables us to see the humanity of those responsible for our wounding, and, having forgiven them, admit them into our world of common humanity.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Venezuela, que estuvo abierta a unas elecciones limpias, da marcha atrás

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      Las autoridades rescindieron la invitación a los observadores de la Unión Europea para la votación presidencial de julio, en otra señal de que es poco probable que Nicolás Maduro ceda el poder.[Estamos en WhatsApp. Empieza a seguirnos ahora]Funcionarios venezolanos rescindieron una invitación a la Unión Europea para observar las próximas elecciones presidenciales del 28 de julio, otra clara señal de que es poco probable que el presidente Nicolás Maduro ceda el poder a pesar de permitir que un candidato de la oposición se presente contra él.Tras meses de intensificación de la represión por parte del gobierno de Maduro —que prohibió a aspirantes legítimos presentarse a las urnas, encarceló a opositores políticos y reprimió a la sociedad civil—, la autoridad electoral del país sorprendió a muchos en abril cuando permitió al exdiplomático Edmundo González inscribirse como candidato de la oposición.El gobierno venezolano se ha visto asfixiado por las sanciones impuestas por Estados Unidos y la Unión Europea a la vital industria petrolera del país, y algunos expertos afirman que Maduro permitió que González se presentara solo porque podría ayudarle a convencer a Washington y a sus aliados para que suavizaran las sanciones.El presidente del Consejo Nacional Electoral, Elvis Amoroso, dijo en una emisión televisada que estaba rescindiendo la invitación hasta que la UE levantara “las sanciones coercitivas, unilaterales y genocidas impuestas a nuestro pueblo”.“Sería inmoral permitir su participación conociendo sus prácticas neocolonialistas e intervencionistas contra Venezuela”, agregó.La UE dijo en un comunicado que “lamenta profundamente la decisión unilateral” del consejo electoral y pidió al gobierno que reconsidere su decisión.La economía de Venezuela implosionó hace casi una década, provocando uno de los mayores desplazamientos del mundo en la historia de América Latina: más de siete millones de venezolanos han abandonado el país, contribuyendo a una oleada migratoria hacia el norte que se ha convertido en un tema dominante en la campaña presidencial de EE. UU.Tres encuestas realizadas en el interior del país mostraron que la mayoría de los encuestados pensaba votar por González. Pero hay dudas generalizadas de que Maduro permita que se hagan públicos esos resultados, o que los acepte si se hacen públicos.Este año, el gobierno de Maduro ya ha detenido y encarcelado a 10 miembros de la oposición. Otros cinco tienen órdenes de arresto y están escondidos en la Embajada de Argentina en Caracas, la capital de Venezuela.Una propuesta en la legislatura también permitiría al gobierno suspender la campaña de la oposición en cualquier momento. Muchos venezolanos que viven en el extranjero no han podido registrarse para votar debido a los costosos y engorrosos requisitos.Maduro, de 61 años, es el heredero político del movimiento socialista de Hugo Chávez en Venezuela, y ha consolidado el poder desde que ganó el cargo por primera vez en 2013. Controla funcionalmente el poder legislativo, el ejército, la policía, el sistema judicial, el consejo electoral, el presupuesto del país y gran parte de los medios de comunicación, así como las violentas bandas paramilitares llamadas colectivos.Él y su círculo íntimo también han sido acusados de abusos sistemáticos contra los derechos humanos que constituyen crímenes de lesa humanidad, incluidos homicidios, tortura y violencia sexual. More