Khmer Killing Fields

Sunday, June 18, 2017

ICC ruling on Bashir imminent



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File: Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir, who was allowed to come to and leave South Africa despite an international warrant for his arrest. Photo: REUTERS/Siphiwe Sibeko
THE HAGUE - War crimes judges will rule next month on whether South Africa flouted international law when it failed in 2015 to arrest visiting Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir, wanted on charges of genocide in Darfur.
The International Criminal Court "convenes a public hearing on 6 July ... for the delivery of its decision", the court said in a statement on Friday.
The tribunal based in The Hague "invites representatives of South Africa and the prosecutor to attend".
The government, at an unprecedented hearing in April, disputed accusations by ICC prosecutors that it had broken its obligations to the very tribunal it helped found in 2002.
To the frustration of prosecutors, Bashir remains in office and at large despite two international warrants for his arrest issued in 2009 and in 2010.
He faces 10 charges, including three of genocide as well as war crimes and crimes against humanity charges relating to the conflict in the western Darfur region.
Pretoria and the ICC became entangled in a bitter dispute in 2015 when Bashir was allowed to attend an African Union summit in Johannesburg despite the arrest warrants against him, flying home unhindered afterwards.
South Africa's lawyers, which had sought legal clarification from the ICC's judges shortly before Bashir's visit, argued that he enjoyed immunity as a head of state.
Prosecutors in return said that South Africa, as a member state of the court, had the duty to arrest and hand over Bashir, which it failed to do.
The ICC does not have a police force and it depends on member states to arrest and hand over wanted suspects.
The long-time Sudanese president has denied the charges against him and continues to travel to various countries with impunity.
Sudan's deadly conflict broke out in 2003 when ethnic minority groups took up arms against Bashir's Arab-dominated government, which launched a brutal counter-insurgency.
The UN Security Council asked the ICC in 2005 to investigate the crimes in Darfur, where at least 300,000 people have been killed and 2.5 million displaced, according to UN figures.
South Africa announced it had told the United Nations in October that it was pulling out of the ICC following the Bashir debacle.
But a South African court in February ordered Pretoria to reverse the decision, saying it was unconstitutional.
AFP

Sunday, August 21, 2016

Falmouth Couple Hosts Young Refugees From Ethiopia escaping genocide








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Refugees Agut O. Odolla, 21, and Mapach O. Odolla, 16, spent this summer analyzing dirt samples and serving pie in Woods Hole, but the quiet lives that the siblings led over the past few months stand in stark contrast to the history of violence, struggle and displacement that they have survived.
Dr. Michael J. and JoAnn N. Fishbein hosted the siblings and have hosted members of the Odolla family at their home on Punch Bowl Drive for the past several summers. The couple met the family through their daughter, Emily H. Fishbein, who works for the refugee service that helped the family resettle in Baltimore from a Kenyan refugee camp.
Dr. and Ms. Fishbein said they did not know much about the siblings’ story when they first visited Cape Cod. “Little by little we learn these pieces, just by being with them a lot,” Ms. Fishbein said. “I think as we build a relationship and trust, we hear more.”
In an interview earlier this month, Agut and Mapach sat side by side on a large couch in the Fishbein’s television room to share their story in full.
Agut and Mapach grew up in Western Ethiopia outside of the city of Gambella, which is situated on the Sudanese border.
The Odolla family is part of the Anuak tribe, an ethnic group that considers itself indigenous to the Gambella region but which is now a minority in the area.
Their father was a farmer, and Mapach said that the ground in the tropical region, fed by the Boro River, was so fertile that their father never even had to water their crops.
On December 13, 2003, however, the family’s day-to-day life changed forever.
“That was the day they killed everybody,” Agut said. “In Gambella, it was Saturday around twelve o’clock, and that’s when the killing started.”
That December, under clear blue skies, the Anuak people were massacred in a genocide that killed about 424 people over the course of three days, according to the Human Rights Watch. Agut and Mapach said that the Ethiopian government and military, largely controlled by the powerful Nuer Tribe, carried out the attacks on their tribe.
“It was completely unexpected; it just happened out of nowhere,” Mapach said.
Some were killed in their homes. “If you would hide your husband, they would beat you until you told,” Agut said. “If they find the person they would just kill him in front of you, and leave you with the kids, or someone there would just rape you.”
Others, Agut said, were found during Saturday prayer and slaughtered in church buildings.
The Odolla family was spared from the initial violence of that day because their farm was located outside of the city. First word of the massacre came from friends and family members who had fled to take refuge at the family farm. The children’s father, who had been shopping in the city that day, did not return, and the family had no way of knowing whether he had escaped or been killed.
It wasn’t more than a few days before the Odolla children had to flee into the jungle as well, hoping their father was alive somewhere else.
Since then, thousands of Anuak people have fled Ethiopia, and ethnic tensions and violence continue.
“I guess it’s still happening today but no one will really talk about it,” Agut said. “One reason would be we are the minority. And, um, a lot of people are not really educated about it. And I think we don’t really have voice.”
Two years later, Agut, Mapach, their mother and five siblings were reunited with their father in a Kenyan refugee camp in Dadaab, where he had prepared a home for them.
Dadaab is a complex of five refugee camps, the largest in the world; according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), Dadaab currently holds more than 338,000 registered refugees, which is more refugees than currently live in the United States. If Dadaab were considered a city, it would be the fourth largest in Kenya.
In fact, the camp functions like an independent city in many ways. The UN gives building materials to refugees upon arrival at the camp, but the families are left to create their own shelter. Every 15 days the UN would provide their family with food, water, and firewood to cook with, but Agut said the rations were barely enough to keep them alive. As a result, the camp is a ramshackle of small businesses, as families try to supplement their limited resources; Agut and Mapach’s family made and sold a popular Ethiopian flatbread called injera.
Mapach was about six years old when his family first reached the refugee camp, and he remembers the lifestyle fondly.“Living there was fun,” Mapach said. He is an avid soccer player, and he developed most of his skills during his stay in Dadaab.
“Almost every boy plays soccer because if you don’t play, what do you do?” Mapach said. “There’s nothing else to do, except go to school and then go to soccer afterwards.”
Although the children were able to attend school while living in the refugee camp, Agut said the quality of their English lessons was poor.
“The problem was that the teachers were not really qualified to be teaching because they were just high school students who had just graduated” from the Dadaab schools, Agut said. The extent of their English learning was memorization of the ABC’s, their names, and a few other key words.
Although some refugees in Dadaab will spend their entire lives in the camp, the Odolla family was selected to leave after just a four-year stay. But even after being identified as candidates for resettlement, the interview process with the UN took two full years.
The UN selects and approves only those families who have the highest need for resettlement, evaluating how dangerous it would be for a family to return to their home country and the quality of life for them in Kenya. Less than one percent of the 14.4 million refugees across the globe are submitted to be resettled.
UN officials conduct a series of interviews with all of the family members, even the young children, to verify that their stories match up. Even the slightest deviation could mean rejection of the family’s application.
Dr. Fishbein said many people do not understand the in-depth nature of the refugee resettlement process when they talk about refugees, especially in current political debates about immigration.
“It’s really unfair because it’s probably the most vetted group that comes here,” Dr. Fishbein said.
After two years of interviews and waiting, in 2010 the Odolla family received notice that they would be relocated in the United States.
The International Refugee Committee (IRC), a nonprofit organization founded by Albert Einstein during World War II, provided a home and food for the family upon their arrival in Baltimore and helped them settle into their new home.
Ms. Emily Fishbein works for the IRC, and she was integral in helping the Odolla children integrate into local public schools through the Refugee Youth Project.
“We didn’t speak English or anything, and we just needed someone to be there,” Agut said.
Despite not being able to speak English, the children began taking classes as soon as they arrived in the city. Agut and Mapach took full-immersion English as a Second Language (ESL) courses with other refugees and immigrants, and although they picked up English quickly, Agut and Mapach said their first year was a difficult adjustment.
Now, Agut and Mapach can communicate their story in perfect English.
The children were bullied because of their skin color, a concept that Agut said was completely foreign to them. She remembers boys following her to class, taunting her for being “too black” and “ugly.”
“I cried most of the time when people talked about my skin color because it hurts so much,” she said in a written speech. During those early years, Agut spent hours in her room crying after school.
“They come here after enduring a lot obviously, and they had this hope that things will be better, and it is in a lot of ways,” Dr. Fishbein said. However, he said that isolation was a major issue for the children and their parents, who were the only Anuak family in the city.
The transition was particularly difficult for Agut, who had been educated to a 5th grade level while in the Kenyan refugee camp, but was forced to skip middle school in the US because of her age at 16 years old.
“When I got here they told me I was old enough to go to high school and I was like, ‘But I don’t speak English so how is this going to work?’” Agut said. Twice a week Agut attended an optional after school tutoring program with nearby college students, where she learned to read and write.
Despite the fact that she did not speak English when she first enrolled at the school as a freshman, Agut graduated as valedictorian of her graduating class in 2014, and her explanation of her success reads as a bit of an understatement.
“I studied a lot,” Agut said. “By working hard and believing in myself, I did it.”
In her valedictorian speech, she wrote:
“I realized that people talk about others in order to make themselves feel better…They are the ones who are unaware about the vast world out there, the differences other people embody and the many cultures of this world. Once you learn to respect other cultures and embrace difference, you can truly work well with others and create change.”
After graduating as valedictorian, Agut received a full-ride scholarship to McDaniel College in Maryland, where she will be a junior this fall. Agut studies political science and international relations. She hopes to go to law school and eventually work with the UN or for an NGO that protects human rights.
“Maybe me working at the UN will help other people too,” she said.
Mapach will enter into his sophomore year in high school this fall, and he hopes to play soccer for a Division 1 university after he graduates. Practiced from his days in the refugee camp, Mapach has played on his school’s varsity soccer team since freshman year.
Mapach and Agut have been working full time in Falmouth this summer, Mapach at Pie in the Sky and Agut at the US Geological Survey in Woods Hole. When asked how people in Falmouth have reacted to hearing their story, Agut and Mapach said most people do not know it very well.
“I don’t really tell people my story if they don’t ask,” Agut said. “If you don’t ask, then maybe you don’t wanna know.”
On weekends, the siblings spend time exploring Cape Cod with Dr. and Ms. Fishbein, sailing, fishing, and taking bike rides.”People in Falmouth are really nice,” Mapach said.
Agut and Mapach left Cape Cod on Monday, August 15, to return to Baltimore, and Dr. and Ms. Fishbein said they will miss their young energy and helpful spirit.
“It’s given me a better appreciation about how comfortable my life is and how fragile life is for so many people around the world,” Ms. Fishbein said.
Dr. and Ms. Fishbein have lived in Falmouth on and off since 1983. Ms. Fishbein is a social worker for Hope Hospice on Martha’s Vineyard, and Dr. Fishbein is a radiologist with Cape Cod Health Care.

Thursday, May 29, 2014

Reeducating Rwanda to change paradigm of origin of Tutsi as being form" Ethiopia became main cause of the genocide"


David Moshman Become a fanProfessor of Educational Psychology

Original title-

Education for Rwanda


What is education for?
Education is for learning, of course. But is it also for anything else?
Some advocate education for thinking, education for rationality or education for development. Some support education for liberty or education for democracy Some propose education for life or education for change.
No one advocates education for genocide. But schools sometimes serve that purpose.
In From Classrooms to Conflict in Rwanda (Cambridge University Press, 2014), Elisabeth King concludes that education played a major role in the societal trends leading to the 1994 Rwanda genocide and that Rwandan schools continue to play a major role in exacerbating social conflict. Her analysis is consistently thorough, insightful and convincing.
King discusses education in Rwanda during three successive historical periods: Belgian colonization (1919-1962), the post-colonial Republics (1962-1994) and the period since the 1994 genocide. Within each, she systematically addresses three interrelated issues: differential access to education, the presentation of Rwandan history and the treatment of identity.
King interviewed, and quotes extensively from, 80 individuals, most of whom had been teachers or students (or both) in Rwandan schools during one or more of the three historical periods. Most of the 75 Rwandans identified themselves as either Hutu or Tutsi. The other five interviewees were elderly Belgians, interviewed in Belgium, who had served as colonial administrators or missionaries.
King also interviewed Rwandan professors and government officials, spoke informally with many other Rwandans, and studied curriculum materials and educational policy documents. Her presentation is scholarly but she doesn't hesitate to reach conclusions justifiably critical of Rwandan educational policy and practice in all three historical periods.
Beginning with the Belgian colonial period, King notes that access to primary schools (grades 1-6) was extremely limited. Most primary students were Tutsi despite the fact that Tutsi were a minority (about 15 percent) of the population. Most students failed to complete grade 6 and only a tiny proportion -- overwhelmingly Tutsi -- went on to secondary education.
History education in colonial primary schools consisted mostly of European history. Secondary schools taught a European version of Rwandan history in which the Tutsi were a superior Caucasian race that came south centuries ago from Ethiopia and rightly dominated the Hutu, a backward Bantu race that had arrived previously and dominated the indigenous Twa.
Identity -- defined as Hutu, Tutsi, or Twa -- was highlighted throughout the secondary curriculum. The Twa, about one percent of the population, were marginalized and ignored. A typical text noted that the Hutu showed "atavistic stupidity" whereas the Tutsi, who were taller and had finer features, were "sage and prudent." The Tutsi, as one teacher put it, were "aristocratic Negroes."
And then everything changed, except what didn't.
With independence in the early 1960s the Hutu majority gained control for the first time, but the differentiation of Hutu from Tutsi intensified. Hutu access to schooling increased dramatically as Rwanda's education system expanded, but Tutsi access beyond the primary level was limited by strict quotas.
After independence, Rwandan history began to be taught in primary schools and received increased attention in secondary schools. Now the Tutsi were presented as immigrants who oppressed the Hutu cultivators already working the land. As one interviewee described the curriculum, "they said that Rwanda was for Hutu. They are Rwandan. The others, it is for them to stay in Ethiopia."
In many classes toward the end of this period, students were required to sort themselves as Hutu or Tutsi. Most knew their group; those who didn't learned where they belonged. Despite the dramatic reversal since colonial times in the status of the two groups, everyone still learned that one group was good and the other bad.
Looking across the colonial and post-colonial periods, there are deep and troubling continuities. In addition to ongoing problems of differential access to education, we see divisive social processes of mandatory categorization and systematic group stigmatization.
By the early 1990s, the division of Rwandans into Hutu and Tutsi categories was moving inexorably toward strictly dichotomized and collectivized identities. Each Rwandan was identified and understood first and foremost as Hutu or Tutsi. The associated stigmatization, meanwhile, was escalating into the radical dehumanization that makes genocide possible.
In spring 1994 the schools all closed as hundreds of thousands of Hutu killed hundreds of thousands of Tutsi. The rivers were clogged with the bodies of Tutsi on their way back, it was said, to Ethiopia.
In September 1994 schools began to reopen. In a future post, I will discuss King's account of Rwandan education since 1994 and her well-justified fears for the future.