Holocaust survivor and Museum volunteer Alfred Münzer calls for the protection of Syrian civilians to be front and center of US foreign policy and the world’s attention.
March 15, 2017 marks the 6th anniversary of the civil war in Syria, a conflict which has cost more than 400,000 lives and forced half a nation to flee.
Central African Republic is most likely to see an onset of state-led mass killing in 2017, according to the Early Warning Project’s most recent public wiki survey.
The Simon-Skjodt Center's Deputy Director Naomi Kikoler joined a recent Harvard Humanitarian Initiative podcast to discuss the acts the genocide, which include the murder of men and the elderly and forcing women and children into slavery, and debate the prospects for justice.
Which countries in the world are most likely to see the start of new episodes of state-led mass killing in 2017? To help us answer this question, we’d like you to vote in our fourth annual wiki survey. Participation can take as little or as much time as you like, and even just a few minutes of your time will improve our results.
The West African nation of The Gambia has made a quite habit of generating headlines for all the wrong reasons. The country’s moniker as the “Smiling Coast of Africa” belies a tragic and brutal reality on the ground. Located in a region that has made tremendous advancements in terms of deepening democracy and expanding both political and economic rights, The Gambia has been mired under the patently dangerous leadership of Yahya Jammeh, who came to power in 1994 by means of a military coup and has since vowed to rule for “one billion years.”
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?
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