On 22 December 2014, militants killed over 70 unarmed men, women and children in India’s Assam State. Massacres of civilians have become all too common in the region. Forty two died in one afternoon in May 2014 and more than 100 people were killed over several weeks in 2012. Despite this violence the region receives little international attention.
Guest Post by Christine Mehta, a Researcher for Physicians for Human Rights. In the last few months of 2015, Christine Mehta traveled to Ukraine several times as part of a delegation tasked with assessing Ukraine’s forensic capacity and political willingness to investigate human rights violations related to the conflict, such as torture, extrajudicial killings, sexual violence, and enforced disappearances. “Forensic capacity” means the technical expertise and equipment to collect, preserve, and analyze medical or scientific evidence in a criminal case. Also part of the mission was to explore damage to medical facilities and disruption of health care delivery to citizens affected by the conflict, including internally displaced persons.
Last month, prominent Turkish human rights lawyer Tahir Elci was shot dead on a street in Diyarbakir, southern Turkey. Elci had been an outspoken activist for Kurdish rights in a region that has seen decades of conflict between Turkish security forces and the Kurdistan Worker’s Party (PKK), a militant and political movement for greater Kurdish autonomy. In TIME magazine, Jared Malsin writes that Elci’s murder is a sign of dark and uncertain days ahead for Turkey as it follows the collapse of a ceasefire between the PKK and the Turkish government in July.
Mass atrocities occur rarely, and they are hard to predict. So aren’t risk assessments in the form of predicted probabilities, like the ones the Early Warning Project produces, a little too precise? When we ask the participants in our opinion pool to assign a number to their beliefs about the likelihood that various events will happen, are we really adding useful information, or are we putting too fine a point on things?
For most of us, citizenship is a status we can comfortably take for granted. Yet the millions of people who are denied citizenship of the country where they reside often have no rights, no protections, and no recourse for the redress of grievances. The simplest of life’s activities—opening a bank account, getting a driver’s license, or even attending elementary school—becomes a risky and humiliating process fraught with unpredictable dangers and the threat of harassment, arrest, and often deportation.
The Rohingya, a Muslim minority group, will not be able to participate in this election because the government has deprived Rohingya men and women of the right to vote. Rohingya people in Myanmar have endured periods of violence and persecution since 1948; this most recent round of persecution follows a wave of violence unleashed in 2012 which forced an estimated 140,000 Rohingya to flee from their homes.
As purveyors of early warning, we have to choose a definition in order to conduct and describe our risk assessments. If we aren’t very specific about what we’re attempting to foresee, we can’t build sound statistical models, and we can’t properly direct the attention of the experts in our opinion pool or assess the accuracy of their forecasts.
In examining the risk of state-led mass killing in Pakistan, the line between state and non-state actors is fuzzy, especially when it comes to perpetrators of mass violence against civilians. Rather than perpetrating violence themselves, Pakistani security forces—especially the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), the Pakistani intelligence services—use militant groups to advance political and territorial objectives inside Pakistan and in contested areas like the Indian-administered Kashmir region. Ongoing violent conflict, especially in Pakistan’s northwest Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), also contributes to increased risks of new mass killing.
On Monday, the United Nations issued a statement calling for the immediate end to an escalation of violence in the Central African Republic. Dozens were killed after the murder of a man in Bangui, with many fearing that this could mark a return to the sectarian violence that saw thousands killed since violence began in December 2013.
The chart below summarizes our Expert Opinion Pool’s current take on risks of new mass-killing episodes in countries about which we’ve asked them.
Find information on historical cases of genocide and other atrocities.
