Author: Tim

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US diplomat killed in Sudan

The New Year began with violence in Sudan as a United States diplomat was gunned down during his drive home in the capital of Khartoum.

In Washington, the Agency for International Development identified the diplomat as one of its officials, John Granville, 33, originally of Buffalo. American officials said it was “too early to tell” if the shooting had been random or planned, but Sudanese officials said the circumstances were suspicious, especially because gun crime is rare in Khartoum, considered one of the safest cities in Africa.

The United Nations had recently warned its staff in Sudan that there was credible evidence that a terrorist cell was in the country and planning to attack foreigners.

According to Western officials, Mr. Granville left a New Year’s Eve party at the British Embassy around 2:30 a.m. and was being driven to his home in an upscale neighborhood in central Khartoum. Shortly before he arrived, a car pulled up next to him and 17 shots were fired, Sudanese officials said.

Mr. Granville’s driver, a Sudanese employee of the American Embassy, was killed instantly, and Mr. Granville was shot in the neck and chest. He was taken to the hospital and died several hours later.

Considering Granville was an employee of USAID, an agency that frequently participates in regime change, it’s probably equally likely that the Khartoum government lent a hand to whoever was planning the attack. The New York Times itself seemed to be alluding to the same idea:

Mr. Granville had served the Agency for International Development in Sudan as well as Nairobi. A photo on the agency’s Web site shows Mr. Granville standing amid a crowd of African women, each holding a radio distributed by the agency.

Mr. Granville had been deeply involved in a project to distribute 450,000 radios equipped with generator cranks and solar panels, which work in places with no electricity.

The goal was to prepare southern Sudan for elections in 2009 and a possible referendum in 2011 on independence, according to Shari K. Bryan, who is a senior associate and regional director for East and Southern Africa at the National Democratic Institute, a nonprofit, pro-democracy group based in Washington.

Regardless of who was ultimately responsible for the killing, it seems likely that Granville’s death is a backlash to the ongoing conflict in Darfur. The attack followed only a day after the African Union handed-off autonomous control of the peacekeeping forces in the region to a hybrid United Nations-African Union force.

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Peace on the decline

The Uppsala Conflict Data Program at the Uppsala University Department of Peace and Conflict Research is reporting that the number of violent conflicts has seen a rise in recent years as peace initiatives are falling off. The Center’s largest number of registered conflicts took place during the 1990’s, but a steady decline began to take place thereafter and continued until 2002. Since then, the number of active conflicts has been holding steady around thirty.

“This is of course a cause of concern. Today’s ongoing conflicts are extremely protracted,” comment researchers Professor Peter Walensteen and Lotta Harbom. “This indicates that the successful negotiation efforts of the 1990s are no longer being carried out with the same force or effectiveness.”

Today’s conflicts appear to be intractable and drawn-out, and the researchers believe that the 1990s peace strategies need to be improved in order to achieve results. At the same time, there are encouraging trends. Conflicts between different groups and peoples, with no involvement of the state, are decreasing in the number of both conflicts and fatalities.

“This type of conflict often arises in the wake of civil war, but they seem to be easier to bring to an end,” says Joakim Kreutz at the Uppsala Conflict Data Program.

Not surprisingly, one of the biggest problems in recent years is the lack of negotiations in the war torn Middle East. Even as the United States takes measures to physically curtail violence, there have been few visible signs that any of the parties in question are being addressed in a meaningful way.

The Middle East is the region in which peace initiatives are most clearly conspicuous in their absence. The central importance of the region for the world’s oil supply and for world religions makes this serious. The conference in Annapolis in lat November 2007 was the first attempt since 2001 to bring the parties together. They even found it difficult to agree on the declaration that started the negotiations, notes Peter Wallensteen.

“This is a worrisome sign. At the same time, we have to welcome all attempts to bring peace to this area. It has been more than 60 years since the UN General Assembly adopted a plan for Palestine. It must be adapted to today’s reality and implemented.”

During the year other regional conflict complexes have emerged and worsened. The crisis in the Sudanese region Darfur is now spreading to the surrounding countries, such as Chad and the Central African Republic.

“These developments have prompted neighboring countries to take certain peace initiatives,” states Lotta Harbom. “The international mediators in the Darfur conflict, including Jan Eliasson, who is also a visiting professor at Uppsala University, are working to arrange negotiations among the parties. But thus far they have had no success.”

It’s likely that many of these conflicts will continue to linger until the United Nations (and others) decide to press en masse. The larger peace deals in the 20th Century were accomplished through multi-national pressure, persuasion, and promising that we’ve seen little of in the last ten to fifteen years.

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Rwandans battle genocide ideology

Since the 1994 genocide, Rwandans have been struggling to separate themselves from the course that led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. Unfortunately, as a recent parliamentary probe revealed, the country is still awash in sentiments of hatred and division.

The probe was established in August to investigate claims that survivors or children of survivors were being regularly harassed. The study examined 32 secondary schools and found that 97 percent exhibited cases of “genocide ideology.”

Damning details of rampant of genocide ideology were equally unearthed at Ecole Secondaire de Gaseke. There, the six-man Chamber of Deputies’ probe team, found widespread cases of anonymous genocide-fuelling letters, with some reading ‘Musenge n’ubwo tutabatema tuzabaroga kandi muzapfa nabi’ (pray because even if we don’t cut you in pieces, we shall bewitch you), ‘Murabeshya tuzongera tubaganze kandi tuzongera tubice kuko niyo ntego – mwa ba Tutsi mwe, twabibutsaga’ (You Tutsis we shall ultimately kill you again, because that is our mission – that’s a reminder).

In that same school, the MPs led by Donatilla Mukabalisa told their colleagues during a plenary session on Monday, that they found writings similar to the infamous ten Hutu commandments, which were published in the former extremist Kangura newspaper, in the run up to the 1994 Rwanda Genocide.

The report indicated that subsequent to the continued hostile agenda targeting Genocide survivor students at Ecole Secondaire de Gaseke, district and the school authorities, transferred some of the most targeted students to other schools, while one was made to become a day scholar.

Threatening anonymous letters were also found in other schools where genocide ideology was found to be rampant including Groupe Scolaire de Shyogwe in Muhanga District, Southern Province; Ecole Secondaire de Mudasomwa in Nyamagabe District, Southern Province; Ecole Secondaire de Taba in Gatsibo District, Eastern Province; Groupe Scolaire de Muhura in Gatsibo District and Ecole Secondaire de Tumba in Rulindo District, Northern Province.

The harassment and segregation is not only being carried out by the students, however, but by the teachers and administrators as well.

In one case, for example , Association pour la Culture, l’Education et le Developpement Integre (ACEDI) de Mataba, a school in Gakenke District, Northern Province, school authorities introduced uniforms for Genocide survivor students, which were different from other students’.

Societal backlashes are historically common following genocidal outbreaks and it’s not surprising to find Rwanda still grappling with these issues thirteen years later; the fact that parliament is looking into instances of racial division and any ideology that could lead to another outbreak of violence is encouraging.

As MP Specioza Mukandutiye correctly stated during a report on the hearing, “we have campaigns to fight against HIV/Aids, we should also have similar campaigns directed towards fighting the ideologies of genocide and divisionism among Rwandans.”

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Anniversary of the Nanjing Massacre

Today is the 70th Anniversary of the Nanjing Massacre,† a six week “orgy of atrocities” that took place during the Japanese occupation of China in 1937.

The anniversary is being marked by the reopening of a memorial hall built to honour nearly 300,000 people who China says were beheaded, burned, bayoneted, disemboweled and buried alive by Japanese Imperial troops during a six-week orgy of atrocities.

Not unlike the Armenian Genocide, the Nanjing Massacre continues to cause controversy and heated debate between governments and politicians who seem to be intent on saving face. Japanese Parliament has said as much, when 100 of its members claimed in June that documents held in their archives proved that only 40,000 people were killed.

Satoru Mizushima, a documentary filmmaker who is working on a movie titled The Truth of Nanking, said this week, “The evidence for a massacre is faked.”

Even Yomiuri Shimbun, a national daily that claims to have the world’s largest newspaper circulation, published an editorial on Tuesday that refused to refer to the prolonged simultaneous killing of Chinese soldiers and civilians as a “massacre,” calling it the “Nanking Incident.”

“Indeed, when the Japanese forces wiped out the remaining Chinese soldiers hiding in the city, many executions and violence against civilians obviously took place, according to records and testimonies from the time,” the editorial said.

“However, there are theories that the number of victims was about 40,000 and that only a fraction of those deaths were murders that violated international law.”

However, as the International Military Tribunal for the Far East disclosed during their hearings of Japanese war criminals in 1946 – 1948, the total number of victims in Nanjing was over 300,000, to say nothing of the 20,000 women who were raped and seem to be entirely overlooked in this ideological discourse.

Numerous eye-witness accounts of the Nanking Massacre were provided by Chinese civilian survivors and western nationals living in Nanking at the time. The accounts included gruesome details of the Nanking Massacre. Thousands of innocent civilians were buried alive, used as targets for bayonet practice, shot in large groups and thrown into the Yangtze River. Rampant rapes (and gang rapes) of women ranging from age seven to over seventy were reported. The international community estimated that within the six weeks of the Massacre, 20,000 women were raped, many of them subsequently murdered or mutilated; and over 300,000 people were killed, often with the most inhumane brutality.

Dr. Robert Wilson, a surgeon who was born and raised in Nanking and educated at Princeton and Harvard Medical School, testified that beginning with December 13, “the hospital filled up and was kept full to overflowing” during the next six weeks. The patients usually bore bayonet or bullet wounds; many of the women patients had been sexually molested.

The international community had filed many protests to the Japanese Embassy. Bates, an American professor of history at the University of Nanking during the Japanese occupation, provided evidence that the protests were forwarded to Tokyo and were discussed in great detail between Japanese officials and the U.S. ambassador in Tokyo.

Brackman (reporter at the trial and author of the book “The Other Nuremberg”) commented: “The Rape of Nanking was not the kind of isolated incident common to all wars. It was deliberate. It was policy. It was known in Tokyo.” Yet it was allowed to continue for over six weeks.

The diaries of Minnie Vautrin, one of the witnesses of the massacre, are scheduled to be published in July of next year. If you’re interested in more information on the Nanjing Massacre, take a look at Princeton’s Nanking 1937 or the Nanjing Memorial site.

†sometimes spelled “Nanking.”

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Kigali Memorial Centre opens

The Kigali Genocide Memorial Centre announced their opening on Tuesday as the first research and postgraduate teaching institute for Genocide prevention.

The study program will be open to undergraduates and postgraduates studying all aspects of human rights and conflict prevention, running both teaching seminars and giving access to primary research resources for doctorate and masters students, the centre said in a statement.

Craig Cowbrough from the Centre told RNA separately that it is expected the new centre will be operational by the end of February next year.

The center sits on a site where 258,000 victims of the Rwandan genocide are buried, and will include the histories of some 38,000 survivors and their families. You can find their website at kigalimemorialcentre.org.