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Boko Haram Accused Of ‘Crime Against Humanity’ As Massacre Images Emerge

Boko Haram Accused Of ‘Crime Against Humanity’ As Massacre Images Emerge

Lagos (AFP) – U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry branded a Boko Haram massacre in northern Nigeria a “crime against humanity” Thursday as satellite images suggested massive destruction in the two towns reported razed by its fighters.

“What they have done… is a crime against humanity, nothing less,” Kerry said as first images of what is feared to be the worst atrocity of the six-year Islamist insurgency emerged.

Hundreds of people, if not more, are reported to have been killed in attacks on the towns of Baga and Doron Baga on the shores of Lake Chad in Borno state, according to Amnesty International.

Boko Haram was “evil” and a serious threat “not just in Nigeria and the region but to all of our values”, Kerry said during a visit to Bulgaria. He said he had spoken earlier to his British counterpart Philip Hammond — who was also in Sofia — about the possibility of “a special initiative with respect to Nigeria and with respect to Boko Haram”.

Amnesty and New York-based watchdog Human Rights Watch published separate satellite images Thursday claiming to show massive destruction in the adjacent towns, adding to fears they may suffered the deadliest strike yet in Boko Haram’s bloody campaign.

Amnesty’s images showed aerial shots of the towns on January 2 — the day before the attack — and January 7, after homes and businesses were razed.

The group said the images suggested “devastation of catastrophic proportions”, with more than 3,700 structures — 620 in Baga and 3,100 in Doron Baga — damaged or completely destroyed.

HRW said 11 percent of Baga and 57 percent of Doron Baga was destroyed, most likely by fire, attributing the greater damage in Doron Baga to the fact that it houses a regional military base.

Nigeria’s military, which often downplays death tolls, said that 150 died and dismissed as “sensational” claims that 2,000 may have lost their lives in the attacks.

Local officials have said at least 16 settlements around Baga were burnt to the ground and that at least 20,000 people fled.

HRW said the exact death toll was unknown and quoted one local resident as saying: “No one stayed back to count the bodies.

“We were all running to get out of town ahead of Boko Haram fighters who have since taken over the area.”

Amnesty said Boko Haram were believed to have targeted civilian vigilantes helping the army after they overran a Multinational Joint Task Force base for troops from Nigeria, Niger and Chad who have been involved in operations against them.

Harrowing testimony has been emerging from survivors about the scale and brutality of the assault in Baga, included one woman reportedly killed while in labor.

Witnesses who spoke to AFP described seeing decomposing bodies in the streets and one man who escaped after hiding for three days said he was “stepping on bodies” as he fled through the bush.

Amnesty said on Thursday it had received accounts from survivors of Boko Haram fighters killing a woman as she was giving birth, during indiscriminate fire that also cut down small children.

“Half of the baby boy (was) out and she died like this,” the unnamed witness was quoted as saying.

A man in his fifties added: “They killed so many people. I saw maybe around 100 killed at that time in Baga. I ran to the bush. As we were running, they were shooting and killing.”

Another woman said: “I don’t know how many but there were bodies everywhere we looked.”

Medical charity Doctors Without Borders (MSF) said on Tuesday that its team in capital of Borno state, Maiduguri, was providing assistance to 5,000 survivors of the attack.

The UN refugee agency has said that more than 11,300 Nigerian refugees fled into neighboring Chad.

Some 300 women were said to have been rounded up and detained at a school, witnesses told Amnesty, adding that older women, mothers and children were released after four days but younger women kept.

Amnesty said the witness accounts and images reinforced fears the attack was Boko Haram’s “largest and most destructive” in its fight to establish a hardline Islamic state in northeast Nigeria, which has killed over 13,000 people since 2009.

“The deliberate killing of civilians and destruction of their property by Boko Haram are war crimes and crimes against humanity and must be duly investigated,” it added.

The Baga attack came before presidential and parliamentary elections in Nigeria next month and an upsurge in violence apparently designed to undermine the vote.

Nigeria’s electoral commission said voting was “unlikely” in rebel-controlled areas and arrangements were being made to allow hundreds of thousands of displaced people to cast their ballots.

Screenshot: A file of a screengrab taken on October 2, 2014 from a video released by the Nigerian Islamist extremist group Boko Haram and obtained by AFP shows the leader of the Nigerian Islamist extremist group Abubakar Shekau (AFP)

Deadly Clash In China: An Ambush By Uighurs Or A Government Massacre?

Deadly Clash In China: An Ambush By Uighurs Or A Government Massacre?

By Barbara Demick, Los Angeles Times

BEIJING — What happened in the dead of night on a desolate road near a desert oasis in northwestern China is so shrouded in mystery that it would seem that nearly everybody who witnessed it took an oath of silence — or is dead.

But the most reliable accounts suggest that heavy-handed religious restrictions on the eve of one of Islam’s largest holidays provoked an uprising by Uighurs against police and civilians.

According to official accounts, 96 people died in the July 28 clash in Shache, also known as Yarkand, making it the deadliest incident of ethnic violence in China in five years. Uighurs, members of a Turkic Muslim minority concentrated in the Xinjiang region, say the death toll was much greater. Some are describing it as a massacre.

Nury Turkel, a Washington-based attorney who is active with the World Uyghur Conference, said it appeared the government was trying to hide something. “Something terrible has happened that they are trying to sweep under the rug,” Turkel said.

Like many such incidents, this one appears to have started small and spun out of control because of overreactions and miscalculations.

A resident of the town said the trouble began July 27 when Muslims were preparing for the Eid al-Fitr holiday, which ends the holy month of Ramadan. About 40 women were detained for wearing clothing deemed excessively Islamic, which is banned in Xinjiang.

“The women’s husbands and sons went to talk to the relevant people, saying that the women had to go home to prepare for the holiday. They did not agree,” said the resident, who, like other Uighurs in China, spoke on condition of anonymity.

Ghayyar Kuerban, a Uighur from Shache who lives in Germany but is in touch with the town’s residents, heard a similar story.

“There was a religious gathering, which the security thought was illegal. A large number of security forces came. There was a confrontation and things escalated,” Kuerban said. He said he was told that 15 to 20 people were shot at the gathering and that riots spread afterward to nearby villages.

“It is still very ambiguous,” Kuerban said. “There has been absolutely no independent reporting on what happened.”

Authorities allege that there was an “organized and premeditated” attack in which assailants armed with knives and axes ambushed cars and trucks on Route 215, the main road south into the town.
They identified the mastermind as Nuramat Sawut, a former imam who had links to the East Turkestan Islamic Movement, a separatist group operating across the border in Pakistan.

The Xinjiang Daily, a state-run newspaper, reported Thursday that Sawut had been fired from his job as an imam in a village mosque because of his disrespect for the elderly and poor knowledge of Islam.

“He is the shame of our village,” the newspaper quoted a cousin of Sawut’s as saying. “After the terrorist attack, everybody has drawn a clear line. We all support the Communist Party and the government in their efforts to strike a hard line against terrorism and return a peaceful life to us.”

A government-run website, Tianshan, ran a melodramatic feature about two Uighur motorists who were killed in the road ambush by “mobsters waving big knives and axes whose eyes were red.”

“You need to join our holy war. Otherwise we will kill you,” a member of the mob told the motorists, according to the report.

“This is a crime. This is destroying the reputation of Islam. You are not real Muslims,” one of the motorists responded shortly before he was killed. The story did not identify the source of the dialogue.

According to officials, 37 civilians were killed in the incident and 59 assailants were shot dead by police. An additional 215 people were arrested.

Overseas Uighurs discount the Chinese version of events. They say authorities locked down the town for days, blocking telephone calls and the Internet to prevent news from leaking out. The only reporting on what happened has come from the state news media.

Rebiya Kadeer, head of the World Uyghur Conference, said in an interview with Radio Free Asia that her group had information that 2,000 to 3,000 people were killed.

“We have evidence in hand that at least 2,000 Uighurs in the neighborhood of Ailixihu township have been killed by Chinese security forces on the first day and they ‘cleaned up’ the dead bodies on the second and third day during a curfew that was imposed,” Kadeer told the news service.

Other Uighur activists say that estimate is probably too high, but they believe far more people were killed than the 96 reported by the government.

“The Chinese government needs to allow independent reporting here if they want to be a respected member of the international community,” Turkel said.

Photo via WikiCommons

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At Least 15 Dead As Islamists Strike Again On Kenyan Coast

At Least 15 Dead As Islamists Strike Again On Kenyan Coast

Mpeketoni (Kenya) (AFP) – At least 15 people have been killed in a new attack near Kenya’s coast, officials said Tuesday, just 24 hours after Somalia’s Shebab rebels massacred close to 50 people in the same area.

The Al-Qaeda-linked Islamist group said its fighters carried out the latest attack on a village, and that its commando unit had managed to return to base unhindered after two nights of carnage.

“We carried out another attack last night. We killed 20 people, mainly police and Kenyan wildlife wardens. The commandos have been going to several places looking for military personnel,” Shebab’s military spokesman Abdulaziz Abu Musab told AFP by telephone.

“The commandos have fulfilled their duties and returned peacefully to their base,” he added, without saying if the attackers were still inside Kenya or had driven back across the Somali border, around 60 miles to the north.

Police confirmed the gunmen, apparently part of the same group that massacred nearly 50 people in the town of Mpeketoni overnight Sunday, attacked the village of Poromoko, also situated in Lamu county, late on Monday.

Kenyan police spokeswoman Zipporah Mboroki confirmed the new attack — which came as top officials were flying in to the area to coordinate security operations — and security sources said there were 15 dead.

Sunday night’s assault on Mpeketoni, near the coastal island and popular tourist resort of Lamu, was the worst attack on Kenyan soil since last September’s siege of the Westgate shopping mall in the capital Nairobi, in which 67 people were killed.

Witnesses described how the militants drove into the predominantly Christian town on Sunday night, attacked a police station and then hotels and homes. The gunmen also singled out non-Muslims for execution, sparing Muslim men as well as women and children.

“They arrived and asked people to get out. They asked them to lie down, and then they shot them one by one, right in the head, one after another,” said David Waweru, who was watching a World Cup match in a cafe but managed to hide behind a house when the Mpeketoni attack started.

Shebab said the attack was further retaliation for Kenya’s military presence in Somalia as well as the “Kenyan government’s brutal oppression of Muslims in Kenya through coercion, intimidation and extrajudicial killings of Muslim scholars”.

Kenyan troops crossed into southern Somalia in 2011 to fight the Shebab, later joining the now 22,000-strong African Union force battling the militants and supporting the war-torn Horn of Africa nation’s internationally-backed but fragile government.

Several fundamentalist clerics have also been murdered in Kenya’s port city of Mombasa in recent years, with rights groups accusing the Kenyan government of carrying out extra-judicial killings.

Shebab also declared Kenya a “war zone” and warned tourists and foreigners to stay out of the country, once a top beach and safari destination but now facing a sharp drop in tourism revenue due to political tensions, rising violent crime and the wave of shootings and bombings blamed on the Shebab.

“Foreigners with any regard for their safety and security should stay away from Kenya or suffer the bitter consequences of their folly,” Shebab said in a statement on Monday.

“We hereby warn the Kenyan government and its public that as long as you continue to invade our lands and oppress innocent Muslims, such attacks will continue and the prospect of peace and stability in Kenya will be but a distant mirage,” the group said.

Mpeketoni was extremely tense on Tuesday, with residents fearing new attacks despite the presence of police and paramilitary reinforcements, AFP correspondents said.

“People thought it was over yesterday but when we heard the news of this morning, the mood became very bad,” said David Njoroge, a 54-year-old local pastor.

“Here we are Christians and Muslims, and all the people killed were Christians. The tension is starting to grow.”

Photo: Simon Maina via AFP

Scholars Discuss Tiananmen Square At Symposium Marking Massacre’s 25th Anniversary

Scholars Discuss Tiananmen Square At Symposium Marking Massacre’s 25th Anniversary

By Jeff Gammage, The Philadelphia Inquirer

PHILADELPHIA — In China, Maura Cunningham says, if you’re going to hold an online discussion of the Tiananmen Square massacre, you better speak in code.

Don’t mention “June 4th,” the date the tanks rolled against unarmed protesters. Instead, try “May 35th” — a count of that month’s 31 days plus four in June. It’s a way around the censors and to avoid the lurking presence of the state security apparatus.

The game being played between citizen and government isn’t exactly cat-and-mouse, said Cunningham, a scholar of Chinese history from Philadelphia.

It’s more like whack-a-mole.

On Thursday, Cunningham, 31, will explore new and ominous shifts in digital media and dissent at what’s expected to be a crowded St. Joseph’s University conference on Tiananmen, timed to the 25th anniversary of the 1989 protests.

“The Internet is a bigger and bigger part of life in China,” Cunningham said in an interview. “But it’s becoming more and more complicated.”

The symposium, called “Tiananmen at 25,” is free and open to the public. It gathers some of the world’s top experts on the massacre and kicks off what promises to be a season of international remembrance.

Harvard University holds its own seminar two days after St. Joseph’s. The University of Southern California U.S.-China Institute released a new video on how journalists covered the protests.

Among the new books is “The People’s Republic of Amnesia: Tiananmen Revisited,” by Beijing-based NPR correspondent Louisa Lim, who gave the keynote speech here Wednesday.

Lim, speaking to about 100 people in Mandeville Hall ON Wednesday, described the Communist Party’s successful effort to scrub the history and memory of Tiananmen from society.

“How can people have forgotten something that occurred in living memory?” she asked.

It turns out, it’s not that difficult. The massacre doesn’t appear in history books. Internet searches for “Tiananmen” bring up tourist information. And people, she said, face punishment or harassment if they bring up the protests.

Lim showed the famous photo of the “Tank Man” — the lone, anonymous figure who stood up and stopped an advancing line of tanks after the killings. Then she described an experiment: she showed the photo to 100 Chinese students at four top universities. Only 15 could identify the picture, and several were nervous to have that knowledge.

“It looks like Tiananmen,” one told her. “But it can’t be.”

Today, the huge square in Beijing’s center is some of the world’s most sensitive and surveilled real estate, a space fraught with historical, political and emotional implications.

Its open plain is traversed each day by thousands of tourists from around the globe — and by plainclothes and uniformed security forces. Looming from its post on the Gate of Heavenly Peace is a giant, iconic portrait of Mao.

The nature of the square changed forever during a few weeks in spring 1989. The death of former Communist Party General Secretary Hu Yaobang, a popular, open-minded reformer, led thousands of students and young people to march to the square in mourning.

More and more protesters arrived over the coming weeks, eventually numbering hundreds of thousands. They demanded government accountability, freedom of speech and of the press, and even built an ersatz Statue of Liberty figure called the Goddess of Democracy.

A sense grew as news coverage spread worldwide that the regime would be toppled, as others had fallen in Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia.

Instead, on June 4, the Chinese government ordered the military to clear the square. Army units advanced from every direction, opening fire on protesters, bystanders and people in nearby buildings. An accurate death toll has never been established, though estimates range from a few hundred to a few thousand.

“It’s vital that we keep the memory and lessons of those weeks alive,” conference organizer James Carter, a St. Joseph’s China expert, said in a statement, “partly to understand China more fully, but also to prevent the people who died standing up for their beliefs from being erased from history.”

In a country where it’s foolhardy to gather publicly to demand democratic reforms, dissent has moved online, onto a shifting landscape of chat rooms and social-media platforms.

Cunningham, who graduated from St. Joseph’s, has seen the change. A former editor of The China Beat — “Blogging How the East is Read” — and a visiting scholar at the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, she’s been traveling in China for a decade.

Back in the mid-2000s, she noticed that a few U.S. or British websites were difficult to access. Today, more and more are inaccessible. Facebook is blocked. So is Twitter and YouTube. And The New York Times.

As a scholar, completing her doctorate from the University of California, Irvine, Cunningham found the squeeze on information sparking her interest in how people find ways around restrictions on “subversive” opinions.

Censored words include not just “massacre” and “tank” but also mentions of Tibet, Taiwan and the restless, autonomous region of Xinjiang.

It’s the big discussion groups and most-read Internet posters drawing government attention, Cunningham said. As in this country, a single, potentially controversial post can easily pass unnoticed.

The government simultaneously censors and embraces the Internet, opening its own accounts to connect with people and promote its ideas.

In the last year there’s been a noticeable tightening online and a crackdown on those who voice complaints. The uncertainty over who else may be reading has pushed many discussions onto networks like WeChat, where users converse with people they know.

“It limits the spread of the idea, but people feel safer,” Cunningham said.

Many people think everything on the Internet is censored in China, but actually it’s more complicated than that, she said. What’s acceptable today might be deemed subversive tomorrow.

“The line is constantly shifting,” Cunningham said. “It’s really hard to know what will get you in trouble.”

akasped via flickr