If you’re a murderous dictator, this is a joyous time to be alive.
No one will make much of a fuss if your opposition leader is jailed, if an annoying journalist goes missing or if, as happened in Congo, a judge who displeases the dictatorial president suffers a home invasion in which goons rape his wife and daughter.
.. The U.S. has abandoned a bipartisan consensus on human rights that goes back decades.
.. I’m back from Myanmar, where leaders are finding that this is also the optimal time to commit genocide.
The army conducted a scorched-earth campaign against the Rohingya ethnic minority, with soldiers throwing babies onto bonfires as they raped the mothers.
.. In the past, human rights was at least one thread of our foreign policy.
.. Trump defended Vladimir Putin for killing critics (“What? You think our country’s so innocent?”), and praised Egypt’s brutal president, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, for “a fantastic job.” Trump hailed the Philippines’s president, Rodrigo Duterte, whose dirty war on drugs has claimed 12,000 lives, for an “unbelievable job on the drug problem.”
.. when Trump visited Manila, he laughed as Duterte called reporters “spies” — in a country where aggressive journalism has landed people in the morgue.
.. A record number of journalists are in prison worldwide
.. Trump has met with the leaders of each of the three top jailers of journalists — China, Russia and Turkey — and as far as we know, has never raised the issue of press freedom with them.
.. “What’s completely gone is the bipartisan consensus that was a cornerstone of our foreign policy, that if you imprison journalists and restrict the media, there will be consequences,”
.. In Cambodia, Prime Minister Hun Sen approvingly cited Trump’s attacks on fake news as a precedent for closing down radio stations and the much admired newspaper Cambodia Daily. After the crackdown, in November, Trump posed for a photograph with Hun Sen, flashing a thumbs-up — and Hun Sen praised the American president for his lack of interest in human rights.
.. “Your policy is being changed,” Hun Sen declared gratefully, and he lauded Trump for being “most respectful.”
.. Trump told the king of repressive Bahrain, “there won’t be strain with this administration.”
.. the government responded a few days later by killing five protesters
.. sentencing Rajab himself to five years in prison for his tweets.
.. Trump’s soft spot for authoritarianism goes way back. He has spoken sympathetically of the Chinese government’s massacres of pro-democracy protesters in 1989, and of Saddam Hussein’s approach to counterterrorism.
.. Periodically, Trump does raise human rights issues, but only to bludgeon enemies like North Korea or Venezuela. This is so ham-handed and hypocritical that it simply diminishes American standing further.
.. approval of the United States has collapsed to a record low of 30 percent. Indeed, more people now approve of China than of the United States. Russia is just behind us.
.. “Trump has been a disaster for U.S. soft power,”
.. “He’s so hated around the world that he’s radioactive. So on those rare occasions when he does something about human rights, it only tarnishes the cause.”
.. In Myanmar, a young Rohingya man pleaded with me: “Please don’t let us be treated as animals.
A verdict of genocide against the Bosnian Serb commander
The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia winds up its work
Mr Mladic was a ruddy-faced soldier’s soldier. He did not lead from behind. His troops loved him. He became, and still is, an icon for many Serbs. He saw himself as a defender of the Serbian nation, having taken up the sword as generations before him had done to fight for his people
.. Mr Mladic believed in revenge. During the second world war his father, a communist partisan, died fighting Croatian fascist forces
.. When his troops took Muslim-held Srebrenica in 1995 he notoriously said: “The time has finally come for revenge against the Turks who live in this area.”
.. In the next few days over 7,000 men and boys were murdered in cold blood.
.. The Hague tribunal found him guilty of genocide for the murders carried out at Srebrenica, but not for those in six other Bosnian municipalities where, although the judgment said that war crimes had taken place, it also ruled that they had fallen short of genocide.
.. The trial will have changed no minds. The tribunal sought to bring reconciliation to the region, but in that it failed. It has amassed a huge archive of testimony about every detail of the Yugoslav wars, an extraordinary resource for future historians. Still, the hope had been that if political and military leaders ended up in court for their deeds in wartime, that would discourage future ones from committing such atrocities. From Syria to the ethnic cleansing of Myanmar’s Rohingyas, this has proved to be a pious dream.
.. But more than revenge, they want better schools, health care and jobs, like everyone else. Today’s leaders have nothing more to do than to get on with the boring task of making life better for the citizens of the seven little successor states of the old Yugoslavia that Mr Mladic and his like destroyed.
Donald Trump just threatened to commit genocide
The speech made an open and outright threat to commit genocide: “The United States has great strength and patience, but if it is forced to defend itself or its allies, we will have no choice but to totally destroy North Korea.”
.. Had Trump threatened to “totally destroy” that country’s nuclear weapons capacity, its army, its government, or its physical infrastructure, the implications under international law would be different, but carrying out his threat “to totally destroy North Korea” would necessarily sow mass death among its population of over 25 million, in direct contravention of the 1948 United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.
.. While simply threatening to commit genocide is not a clear violation of the Convention, conspiracy and public incitement to do so are. If Trump were to act on his threat, he will have signaled his criminal intent in advance.
.. Just as disturbingly, Kim Jong Un’s regime in North Korea has made similar threats.
A Nobel Peace Prize Winner’s Shame