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Congress calls for charges against Ahmadinejad

On Wednesday, the House of Representatives passed a non-binding resolution that calls on the United Nations to charge Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad with genocide. The bill states that:

…on October 27, 2005, at the World Without Zionism Conference in Tehran, Iran, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad called for Israel to be “wiped off the map,” described Israel as “a disgraceful blot [on] the face of the Islamic world,” and declared that “[a]nybody who recognizes Israel will burn in the fire of the Islamic nation’s fury”

…on December 12, 2006, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad addressed a conference in Tehran questioning the history of the Holocaust and said that Israel would “soon be wiped out”

…on August 3, 2006, in a speech during an emergency meeting of Muslim leaders, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad stated that the Middle East would be better off “without the existence of the Zionist regime,” called Israel an “illegitimate regime” with “no legal basis for its existence,” and accused the United States of using Israel as a proxy to control the region and its oil resources

The resolution passed the House with 411 votes and has been forwarded to the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. You can read the entire resolution here.

I find it both sad and ironic that Congress is so easily moved to action against rhetoric, but lacks any strength of resolve to fight actual acts of genocide.

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Aid worker killed in Sudan

Even though Sudan recently agreed (on paper) to accept a mixed UN/AU force into the Darfur region, the violence in the western part of the country has continued unabated. Reuters reports this morning that an aid worker for the NGO ACT-Caritas was killed near the DP camps in Zalingei, bringing the total number of deaths in the area to five.

“This killing follows a spate of attacks in the camps around Zalingei,” the charity said in a statement on 19 June. “Since the beginning of June, five camp residents have been shot and killed, huts have been set on fire, people have been beaten, and women assaulted almost daily. Hijackings of vehicles belonging to the UN and other international organisations also continue.”

Adam Adam, a guard and pump operator at a water point in Khamsa Degaig camp for internally displaced persons in Zalingei, was shot on 17 June. He was one of the local leaders in the camp.

“The incident was witnessed by three women on their way to the water point,” ACT-Caritas noted. “People in the camp tried to react, but the attackers fired shots into the crowd, dispersing them and allowing the gunmen to escape.”

According to the NGO, security in and around Zalingei, where about 100,000 people are camped, has continued to deteriorate over the past year yet people keep arriving every day.

This recent spate of violence against NGOs and displacement camps follows closely behind an announcement that Oxfam would be ceasing its operations in the Gereida region.

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Wildlife survives in Southern Sudan

It’s not often that you get to share any kind of good news when your subject is genocide. So imagine my surprise when I opened up my Google Reader account this morning and read that aerial surveys of south Sudan turned up the presence of some 1.2 million animals (white-eared kob, tiang antelope and Mongalla gazelle) that were thought to have been eradicated by 25 years of violence.

The survey project was conducted by J. Michael Fay, a conservationist with the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) and a National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence; Paul Elkan, director of the Wildlife Conservation Society Southern Sudan Country Program; and Malik Marjan, a Southern Sudanese Ph.D. candidate from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. They worked in cooperation with the Ministry of the Environment, Wildlife Conservation, and Tourism of the Government of Southern Sudan (GoSS). Funding for the project also came from USAID under the USAID/U.S. Department of Agriculture Sudan Agreement and the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service. After years of fighting northern Sudan, Southern Sudan formed an autonomous region as part of a 2005 peace agreement, and will hold a referendum on independence in 2011.

“I have never seen wildlife like that, in such numbers, not even when flying over the mass migrations of the Serengeti,” said Fay. “This could represent the biggest migration of large mammals on earth.”

Fay, Elkan and Marjan also report an estimated 8,000 elephants, with concentrations mainly in the Sudd, the largest freshwater wetland in Africa. They also found evidence of even larger numbers of elephants in Boma and in the Jonglei landscape. According to the World Conservation Union’s African elephant database, there were no reliable records of elephants in Sudan.

“Although we were telling people that wildlife was still present in Southern Sudan, nobody believed us,” said Maj. Gen. Alfred Akwoch, undersecretary of the Ministry of the Environment, Wildlife Conservation, and Tourism. “Thanks to the aerial surveys, we now know that wildlife resources, including elephants, are still intact in many areas, but also urgently need strong measures to conserve and manage them through joint efforts at all levels.”

In sadder animal news, the last two white rhinos in Zambia were shot by poachers earlier this week, killing the female and wounding the male.

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Italian court modifies ex-Nazi’s sentence

Survivors and members of the Jewish community were outraged recently when they heard that Erich Priebke, a former Nazi officer who was convicted of war crimes and has been serving a house arrest life sentence, was given permission to leave each day to work at his attorney’s office.

Priebke has been in prison or house arrest since he was extradited to Italy in 1994 from Argentina. He was convicted of war crimes three years later for his role in the massacre of 335 civilians at the Ardeatine Caves on the outskirts of Rome.

Priebke has admitted shooting two people and helping round up the victims, but has always insisted he was just following orders and should not be held responsible.

The massacre Priebke took part in took place after a partisan attack killed 33 Nazis in Rome.

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Martic gets 35 years

Even though the Cambodian genocide tribunal has yet to get the proper rules set, the Yugoslavian War Crimes Tribunal handed down a 35 year prison sentence to Milan Martic, who was responsible for killing hundreds of people in a campaign to ethnically cleanse Croatia. He was also found guilty of ordering the cluster bombing of Zagreb.

Most of the crimes were “committed against elderly people, persons held in detention and civilians. The special vulnerability of these victims adds to the gravity of the crimes,” said presiding judge Bakone Moloto.

Martic stood still and showed no emotion as Moloto read out the verdict and his sentence.

The three-judge U.N. panel said Martic was deeply involved in a criminal plot with other Serb leaders including Slobodan Milosevic, Gen. Ratko Mladic and Radovan Karadzic to carve out an ethnically pure “greater Serbia” as Yugoslavia crumbled that would include about one third of Croatia.

“It is clear that Milan Martic endorsed the goal of creating a unified Serb state,” said Moloto.

Martic turned himself in to UN officials in 2002, when he was charged on 19 counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity. He was found guilty of 16.