War Crimes in Civil War-Ravaged Sudan

 

"[I am] deeply alarmed [by reports of civilian casualties and forced displacement from El-Fasher]."

"With fighters pushing further into the city and escape routes cut off, hundreds of thousands of civilians are trapped and terrified — shelled, starving and without access to food, health care or safety."

"[There is a dire need for an] immediate ceasefire [throughout the region]."

"[The UN has life-saving supplies ready, but due to the intensified attacks in the region, it has made it impossible for workers to get aid in]."

"Safe, rapid and unimpeded humanitarian access must be allowed to reach all civilians in need."

Tom Fletcher, emergency relief co-ordinator, United Nations

 

"Our liberation of [El Fasher] is the liberation of Sudan, all the way to Port Sudan...."

"We are coming and we are coming heavy." 

"The new Sudan goes forward, the old Sudan gets destroyed."

RSF second-in-command Abdelrahim Dagalo 

 

"[The Rapid Support Forces [RSF] committed heinous crimes against innocent civilians in the city of El-Fasher, where more than 2,000 unarmed citizens were executed and killed on October 26 and 27, most of them women, children and the elderly."

Joint Forces, allies of the Sudanese military  

Camp for displaced families who fled from al-Fashir to Tawila, North Darfur, Sudan. Photograph: Mohammed Jamal/Reuters

 

Sudanese army chief General Abdel Fattah al Burham stated his forces had withdrawn from El-Fasher "to a safer location". In so doing, he acknowledged that his defense operations had lost the battle for the strategic city, leaving the Rapid Support Forces now in full control of all of Darfur. Even so, he made a pledge to continue to fight "until this land is purified". Despite which, analysts conclude that Sudan has now been partitioned along an east-west axis. The RSF has set up a parallel government from a territory that will prove extremely difficult for the military to extract them. 

 

This is a bloody civil war, with the RSF, formerly in partnership with the Sudanese army, since April of 2023 challenging the Sudanese government for total control of Darfur. Formerly known as the Janjaweed, horsed Arab militia in conjunction with the previous government of Omar al-Bashir who was found by the ICC to have been guilty of war crimes in Darfur, the power struggle between the two forces led to their violent separation and the challenge that followed. Since then, over 150,000 people have been killed, with over 14 million displaced in the fighting.  

"The shelling was so intense on Saturday that we had no choice but to flee El-Fashir."

"Along the way, the RSF filmed us and we were beaten and insulted - and they stole what we had on the journey."

"A number of people were captured and ransoms were demanded for their release. Some of those who were taken were later executed."

"During the journey, many people were arrested, and we suffered greatly from hunger and thirst."

Displaced Darfurian  

People arriving in Tawila have been describing the extreme violence they faced as they fled el-Fasher. AFP/Getty Images

 

 Ethnically-motivated atrocities in the western Sudanese city of El-Fasher have been reported since it fell to the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces, concluding the years-long siege that made life an utter misery for those city dwellers who were unable to flee, with the city surrounded by RSF forces. Over 18 months of siege warfare had created fear and threats of starvation for those forced to remain in the city, trapping 260,000 people without external aid being able to reach them. 

 

The Rapid Support Forces now has control over every state capital in the sprawling Darfur region comprised of mostly non-Arab, Black farming communities. NGOs, along with local groups had given warning that mass atrocities would be triggered by El-Fasher's fall to the RSF and those predictions are ringing true. Open-source intelligence and satellite imagery have confirmed the dire state of affairs now reigning for the residents of the city. 

 

According to Volker Turk, UN rights chief, there is a growing risk of "ethnically motivated violations and atrocities", as his office was "receiving multiple, alarming reports that the Rapid Support Forces are carrying out atrocities, including summary executions". According to pro-democracy activists, El-Fasher residents endured "the worst forms of violence and ethnic cleansing" since control of the area was claimed by the RSF.

 

A fighter known for executing civilians in RSF-controlled areas was shown in a video released by local activists shooting a group of unarmed civilians seated on the ground. They were killed at point-blank range. As many as 15,000 civilians from non-Arab groups in the West Darfur capital of El Geneina have been reported to be killed by the paramilitaries, with their track record of atrocities. The Sudanese army itself has also been accused of war crimes.

 

The paramilitary RSF Forces have taken over el-Fasher prompting fears of the lives of thousands of civilians   Image: UNICEF/Xinhua/IMAGO

 

 El-Fasher was considered to represent one of he grimmest places in war-torn Sudan -- thanks to a war labelled by the UN as among the world's worst humanitarian crises. Located outside the city, displacement camps were declared to be in famine. Within El-Fasher, the quarter-million population in desperation turned to eating animal feed to stay alive.  

"[The city] appears to be in a systematic and intentional process of ethnic cleansing of Fur, Zaghawa, and Berti indigenous non-Arab communities through forced displacement and summary execution."

"[This includes what appears to be] door-to-door clearance operations."

Yale University Humanitarian Research Lab 

 

 

"[The crisis is] the final stage of the Darfur genocide."

"I have seen videos of ditches and trenches entirely full of friends, neighbours and family members’ bodies."

"There have been reports of entire families hanging from trees."

Emi Mahmoud, Darfur Internally Displaced People Network  

 

 

Grim 'Justice' for a Grisly Atrocity

Joyti Singh, who was fatally assaulted by six men on a bus in Delhi. Photographs: Arkaprava Ghosh / Barcroft India via Getty Images and Natisha Mallick

"Today is dedicated to the daughters of the country,"
"As soon as I returned from the Supreme Court I hugged the picture of my daughter and said, 'Today, you got justice'."
Asha Devi, mother of Jyoti Singh

"Justice has prevailed."
"[I hope to] build a nation where the focus is on women's empowerment."
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi

"The horrific gang rape has shocked the entire nation, the crime was so brutal that an entire country was outraged."
"We welcome the hanging of the rapists and believe that the country needs to now work on stricter laws to ensure no one ever dares to commit such crimes again."
Swati Maliwal, chairwoman, Delhi Commission for Women

The victim's parents Badrinath Singh (left) and Asha Devi (centre) celebrated what they said was justice for their daughter's murder

India, with its vast population rivalling that of China's, is a huge democracy, whereas China is a communist, police-state. China and India both, each of them with well over a billion people and on the increase, are known for the brilliance of their scientists, that among their populations are people with distinguished careers in medicine, technology, biology. But there is nothing to explain the disparity between the two nations in the plight of women. Where, in India, so many women and girls are victims of male violence. The caste system?

The world was aghast in 2012 when news circulated of a horribly vicious attack that took place on a bus in Delhi, an attack whose malevolent bestiality was beyond comprehension. Physiotherapy student, 23-year-old Jyoti Singh, was gang-raped and her internal organs destroyed by the insertion of a metal rod by the attackers who had raped her. She and a male friend had boarded what they thought was a public bus.

There were five men and a teen on the bus and they started taunting and then abusing the two students. The escalation in violence began when an iron bar was used to beat them, and then developed into a mass rape, and finally the use of the iron bar to express their hateful malice against a defenceless young woman who died shortly afterward, in hospital. The two students had been tossed out of the bus and left to die. The young woman's male friend survived, she did not.

The brutal attack on Jyoti Singh sparked weeks of demonstrations in India.

India now knows her as 'Nirbhaya'; fearless in Hindi. This atrocity aroused the anger of India's women and the men in India who support the right of women to be safe and secure within society. Rallies were held, protests loudly demanded the government act to stem the tide of femicide. Stricter legislation was enacted to punish acts of violence against women. And despite that, nothing appears to have impressed upon misogynistic Indian men that viciously abusing women is a crime for which they will pay, dearly.

In 2018, over 34,000 rapes were reported to Indian police, representing one every 15 minutes, but no one is under the illusion that this is a reliable number, since most rapes go unreported as a result of shame and fear and threats. Rapes are so common, of girls and women that police often fail to take them seriously. There are estimates that up to 99 percent of sex assaults go unreported, according to the 2014-15 Indian National Family Health Survey. Males of rank in the caste system abuse young Dalit women; rape and often kill them but are 'protected' from reprisal.

In the case of the five men who faced the death penalty, one committed suicide while in prison. The under-age teen who had taken part in the rape and beatings of Jyoti Singh and her companion had been sentenced as a minor and spent three years in a reform facility, reflecting the maximum sentence under natioal law for his age. The other four men were executed at the high-security Tihar prison, where a crowd gathered outside, chanting: "Death to rapists".

An Indian man holds a placard reading ‘morning of justice’ outside the prison complex before the hangings in Delhi on Friday. Photograph: Rajat Gupta/EPA

Asperger's Unfortunate Connections

"Asperger managed to accommodate himself to the Nazi regime and was rewarded for his affirmations of loyalty with career opportunities."
"The [child euthanasia] program served the Nazi goal of eugenically engineering a genetically ‘pure’ society through ‘racial hygiene’ and the elimination of lives deemed a ‘burden’ and ‘not worthy of life’."
Herwig Czech, medical historian, published paper

"There were at least 42,000 camps across German-occupied Europe: 980 concentration camps, 1,150 Jewish ghettos, 500 forced brothels, 1,000 camps for prisoners of war, and 30,000 slave labor camps, in addition to unknown thousands of transit centers and lethal medical facilities. Millions were involved in their staffing. Each place required administrators, guards, maintenance crews, cooks, insurers, truck drivers, food sellers and suppliers. Each required people in the community to look the other way."
"In contrast to mechanized images of the Holocaust, child-killing involved personal deliberation of individual cases. This was intimate, done by the very doctors and nurses who cared for the children’s daily needs. Asperger and his colleagues had a godlike autonomy to determine a child’s worthiness to exist. They were not following a clear rulebook, but deciding life and death on a case-by-case basis — talking to the children directly, meeting their parents and studying them closely over time. Far from his postwar reputation as a resister, Asperger worked within a system of mass killing as a conscious participant, very much tied to his world and to its horrors."
Edith Sheffer, Senior Fellow, Institute of European Studies, University of California, Berkeley, author  Asperger’s Children: The Origins of Autism in Nazi Vienna

"As an organization, we do not want to be aligned with someone associated with the Nazi regime. At the same time, we support a community that is resistant to change and have to take this into consideration."
Asperger's Society of Ontario

"[Future use of the term 'Asperger'] is a discussion that must incorporate the views of autistic people."
Simon Baron-Cohen, editor, Molecular Autism

Hans Asperger, Austrian pediatrician at the University Pediatric Clinic, Vienna, about 1940    Pictorial Press Ltd / Alamy Stoc

An Austrian pediatrician by the name of Hans Asperger studied and treated children who exhibited symptoms of mental abnormality. His clinical observations identified these children as functionally 'disabled'. He enlisted and offered his expertise in the 1940s Third Reich purification scheme to rid society of any it judged to be "genetically inferior". He became a functionary of the Nazi regime by referring disabled children to the Am Spiegelgrund clinic in Vienna.

There, hundreds of children were murdered, poisoned in a program that was labelled Aktion T4.  Historian Herwig Czech documented Dr. Asperger's collaboration with the Nazi regime, publishing his findings in the journal Molecular Autism. His article outlined Hans Asperger's connection to German WW-2 era National Socialism, linked to "race hygiene". In addition, historian Edith Sheffer provided even more details in her newly published book, Asperger's Children: The Origins of Autism in Nazi Vienna.

In both published accounts, the experience of two children, Herta Schreiber and Elizabeth Schreiber, children unrelated to one another, were identified as having been signed over to the extermination program, his personal comments distinguishing them as 'unbearable burdens'. This professional man of science who viewed children on the autism spectrum who are classified as "mildly affected" relative to the most autism-impacted, signed their death warrants with little trouble to his conscience.

The present day revelations about the actions and responsibilities in mass murder undertaken by the Nazi regime in cleansing societies of malfunctioning members as useless drags on the public weal has placed the name 'Asperber's' in huge disrepute. No one relishes having a medical condition named after a fascist totalitarian scientist who happened to have an identified condition named after him.

In 2013 the diagnosis of Asperger's syndrome was removed as a stand-alone condition from medical books, and placed within the autism spectrum. As it is, those representing the best interests of people identified as suffering from Asperger's and advocating for their interests, have been struggling with a public perception of such people as being pathologically disturbed and potentially dangerous.

Whereas in reality people with Asperger's syndrome are often victims in society, not its predators and criminals. Mental illness is far likelier to produce vulnerabilities taken advantage of by others, than disturbed people acting out as perpetrators of criminal activity. Autism Spectrum Disorder has a branch devoted to Asperger's and these are basically people experiencing difficulties in adjusting to the social mainstream.

That individuals must countenance awkward public attention brought to bear through misunderstanding of the condition is one thing; adding to it an inglorious history with a connection to the health professional who first identified the symptoms and named the condition as one of mental inferiority and had the honour of it being named after him, is quite a lot to bear.

Ronald Zak, AP   A memorial to children murdered at Am Spiegelgrund, including those referred by Hans Asperger

Unanticipated Efficiencies

How could anyone who loves animals, will have no truck with drugs or alcohol, campaigns against tobacco use and is a vegetarian, inspire rabid hatred in people as a leader of a nation concerned with health not only for himself but others? Of course human beings are multi-dimensional in their interests, their proclivities and their biases. That same person could be a racist of profound dimensions, believing in the superiority of the Aryan 'race' and set himself up as a totalitarian dictator whose goal is to wage war against his immediate European neighbour-nations in preparation for overturning the world order to install himself as the supreme ruler of the international community.

On his way to achieving this goal this man who also believed in astrology and the occult, decided he would cleanse the world of the presence of a religious, ethnic, social-cultural group of people against whom he had taken a profound dislike, waging a disabling public relations campaign of dehumanization against them to convince an already-anti-Semitic European audience that Jews represented a rapacious force of evil prepared to control the world, before unleashing the 'final solution' that would destroy six million European Jews, sending them up the smokestacks of crematoria to replenish the nutrients of the soil of a devastatingly bombed-out Europe.

Human beings can be profoundly, surprisingly, strange. We don't expect psychopaths to have much of a conscience and they don't have, but neither do we expect that they will be concerned over matters of public health -- however in Hitler's case, it was because he envisioned and aimed for a superior human, that the German example of a perfect man and woman creating perfect progeny would be fit to take their place as a symbol of German superiority.

And Hitler's modern-day fascist descendants?

"We dismiss the Islamic State as savage. It is savage. We dismiss it as barbaric. It is barbaric. But at the same time these people realized the need to maintain institutions."
"The Islamic State's capacity to govern is really as dangerous as their combatants."
Fawaz A. Gerges, author, ISIS: A History

"Confiscation [will be applied to the property of every single] Shia, apostate, Christian, Nusayri and Yazidi based on a lawful order issued directly by the Ministry of the Judiciary."
The Caliphate on the Path of Prophecy handbook

"We had no choice but to go back to work. We did the same job as before. Except we were now serving a terrorist group."
"They took our files and started going through them, searching which of the properties belong to Shia, which of them belong to apostates, which of them are people who had left the caliphate."
Muhammad Nasser Hamoud, Iraqi Directorate of Agriculture, Mosul, Iraq

"The only thing I could do during the time of government rule is to give a worker a one-day suspension without pay [for not performing his work up to specifications]."
"Under ISIS, they could be imprisoned."
Salim Ali Sultan, garbage collection authority

Displaced people, who fled Isis, cross the bridge in Al-Muthanna neighbourhood of Mosul (Reuters)

Mosul, in Iraq, was the largest city with the greatest population that Islamic State governed once it marched on the city and the Iraqi military melted away in fear without a shot being fired in opposition. ISIS was able to loot the bank of the second largest Iraqi city of its hundreds of millions, it took oil revenues from the nearby oil wells, and it undertook to govern the city of close to two million people representing Shia and Sunni Muslims, Turkmen, Kurds, Armenians, Yazidis, Circassians, Assyrians  and others.

Mosul was majority Sunni, many resentful of the Shia-led Iraqi government with its preference for Shiite advancement and ignoring Sunni equality in the sectarian divide. Doubtless when Islamic State first entered Mosul the Sunnis felt their time had come. Until the domination-and-conquest-led, Salafist ISIS with its 'pure' Sharia imposition made life difficult for everyone, and took to exacting the 'state' penalty of capital punishment on those citizens whose defiance and/or lack of respect for Sharia brought them death.

In the fist days of the occupation all municipal civil servants were ordered to return to work in their various departments immediately. They were told that as long as they did their work they would be assured protection. Municipal employees returned to fixing potholes, painting crosswalks, repairing powerlines, overseeing payroll, and everything and anything else that a civil society requires to function while ISIS was busy administering an extended population of 12 million people under their purview representing the growing size of their 'caliphate'.

While Islamic State was busy waging war in territories they meant to absorb, and horrifying the international community with its gloating videos of decapitation, crucifixions, and other atrocities, it was also busy building an efficient administration everywhere to collect taxes and haul away municipal trash. It operated a marriage office, issued birth certificates, driver's licenses and vehicle registration. And it did so with exemplary efficiency. Residents noted that the streets were cleaner, roads fixed as required, garbage collected, public transit running on time.

What Mr. Hamoud, who was Sunni, noticed immediately in the early days of ISIS occupation and control was that Sunnis had swiftly replaced Shiite workers; his own department became staffed one hundred percent by Sunnis, while Shia and Christian workers were dismissed or fled entirely. Islamic State policed the population closely, throwing people into  jail for crimes of eyebrow plucking, inappropriate haircuts, playing dominoes or cards or music and hookah smoking.

Nothing was grown, manufactured, delivered and sold that wasn't taxed by Islamic State. Households were taxed for electricity, municipal water, garbage collection, telephone lines, marriage licenses and birth certificates. A personal tax calculated at 2.5 percent of anyone's assets was another toll, up to ten percent for agricultural production. "We have to be honest. It was much cleaner under ISIS", said Mr. Hamoud in an interview, whose daughter had been beaten once by morality police for not wearing the niqab in public, sustaining permanent eye injuries as a result.

In one town, ISIS ordered a committee of electrical engineers to repair an overloaded electrical grid, so new circuit breakers were installed leading to reliability in electricity production locally for the first time in memory. And then, in early 2017, the Iraqi military retook possession of Mosul, were welcomed as heroes. The Islamic State circuit breakers were disconnected, leading to a resumption of the previous power failures.

Smoke rises from an air strike during a battle between Iraqi forces and Isis in west Mosul (Reuters)

Analyzing Forensic Clues for Burial Sites

"It's a way of taking in a lot of data, organizing it and analyzing it for spatial patterns."
"If nothing else, it's going to help people search more efficiently for missing persons."
"It's a huge problem [searching for dead remains lost in countries in conflict]. It's bigger than we realize."
"Ideally, you'd like to say, this is a very kind of human behaviour [how and where soldiers, terrorists or secret police dispose of the dead] and we see a lot of consistencies. That way you can take a lot of information from other countries and make reliable predictions about a country you've not been to."
Derek Congram, forensic anthropologist, researcher, University of Toronto

Canadian forensic anthropologist Derek Congram tests soil during work for the U.S. Defence Department locating remains of missing soldiers in Vietnam.          Handout

An ordinarily little-thought-of problem resulting from civil wars, attempts at genocide, tyrannical governments, is that all too often tens of thousands of people disappear never to be seen again, victims whose bodies have been concealed, shut away from public discovery as a way of shielding their murderers from justice. Derek Congram, a forensics anthropologist based in Toronto, has developed a computer system he hopes will aid the search for victims of war and others.

Families want to know the ultimate disposal of their loved ones. Governments that succeeded those who destroyed peoples' lives look for accountability demanded by their populations. Justice can often not be seen to be served when no proof exists that people have been slaughtered, their bodies buried in mass graves, hidden and awaiting gruesome discovery, from Spain to Rwanda to the Congo, let alone Syria and Iraq.

This man's work leading to the production of his computer-based program that seeks the geographic locations of bodies, was published recently in the journal Forensic Science International, and the attention it attracted led a large U.S. Defense Department program to consult with him in the effort to discover the whereabouts of still-missing GIs from foreign war zones.

Mr. Congram is on the cusp of leaving his work in research at the University of Toronto to take up work as a forensic coordinator for the Red Cross in South America where political violence is not unknown. Colombia awaits his attention as it recovers from a civil war where thousands of civilians were killed. In Spain the search continues for the estimated 115,000 people murdered after being taken from their homes half a century earlier.

In the United States the search for its missing soldiers rings up a price tag of $200-million annually. Developing countries where conflict or genocide has occurred represents a vast field of unmarked mass graves crying out for discovery and identification. A UN investigation in Bosnia and Rwanda went forward to solve the location of those who died in mass slaughters.

The Saddam Hussein Iraq years produced countless unsolved murders, among the 20 countries where Mr. Congram has been involved in a U.S. Justice Department project in the past. His new search system is set to analyze known data surrounding the disappeared, to develop an algorithm to predict their possible locations with inputs when possible, including information about such bodies already previously recovered.

Distance of the burial site from where people went missing, and the area under control by the killers are all added to the data base resulting in a map that identifies possible "hot zones" where such remains might be revealed to be buried. Five known civil-war burial locations in Spain became part of a test of the new program. Three of the locations were proven to be within the hot zones identified by the software, with the remaining two located a short distance off.

His work, which comprised his doctoral thesis, led to three years working with the U.S. Defense team to discover the whereabouts of soldiers' graves who were killed in Southeast Asia and Korea in the hopes that the mapping could make the search more efficient when and if they gain access to territory as yet closed off to entry.

The Innocent Sky

"When you say they died at the end of March, it gives you a feeling that they died just before liberation. So maybe if they'd lived two more weeks?"
"Well, that's not true anymore. [Nonetheless] It was horrible. It was terrible. And it still is."
"In view of this, the date of their death is more likely to [have] be[en] sometime in February. The exact date is unknown."
Erika Prins, researcher, Anne Frank House museum, Amsterdam, Netherlands

There is a playground, a park. Mothers are there with their infants in strollers, under a sea of blue sky, sun blazing above. There are people out walking their dogs. This is the village of Oswiecim, also known as Auschwitz. There is also a Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet located there, for the convenience of people enjoying a beautiful day, an hour west of Krakow, Poland. A typical village day, with people enjoying an early spring landscape.

A short walk away there are bookshops, cafes, and ... memorial shops. And if you're surprised by all that in this grave place of bleak and horrible memories, you will be reminded by your guide not to think of those shops as purveyors of souvenirs. What one can purchase is a 'memorial' item, definitely not a souvenir adjacent to the place where an iron gate reads Arbeit Macht Frei, a cruel joke played on millions of people who hadn't, at first, any idea that they would never be free again.

"Auschwitz was a death factory", states your guide, just in case you weren't fully aware of the purpose of the place you had entered. One of the grimmest places on Earth, in fact. Where Nazi Germany inflicted death on up to ten thousand people daily, where over a million Jews had been murdered in this one of many Third Reich death camps.

But if the sky is blue, then the birds will be singing.

The Auschwitz Album -- Women and children being taken through sector BII of the camp to Crematoria IV and V. In Birkenau, elderly women and children were almost always immediately sent to their deaths in the gas chambers as they were deemed "unfit for work"

There are orderly streets, and one building after another in this stark place of memory. In Block No.4 you will find a silent display of human hair; braids, curls, dark hair, blonde hair, straight hair, wavy hair. when the camp was liberated seven thousand kilograms of hair was found in storage. Human hair was used by the Germans of the day to stuff decorative cushions. If novelties interest you, human skin was also used to bind books; nothing was wasted; human bones were used to produce soap.

Elsewhere, prayer shawls can be found in abundance, along with piles of suitcases, of eyeglasses, of baby clothes. Step outside one building before entering another and a brief reprieve from being a witness to history will allow you to confront the beauty of that clear blue sky; what could ever go awry under such a sky, with the sun floating in the atmosphere high above, blessing Earth with the miracle of life?

The Auschwitz Album -- Jews who were classified as "not fit for work" waiting in a grove outside Crematorium IV before they were to be gassed. At this point, the Jews were exhausted and in a state of shock from the horrors of the journey and the selection process that they had just endured. The vast majority had no idea what fate awaited them.

Those who are affected by what they see to the very depths of their souls may find comfort in thinking that the spirits of the departed, the children in particular, sing now from the full-throated enthusiasm of birds appreciating the approach of spring. Perhaps they would be represented by the unspeakable number of children of all ages whose lives were extinguished in those death camps. Like Anne Frank, at age 15, a girl who believed in  hope, in a better tomorrow.

Her tomorrow remained beyond sight, beyond hearing, beyond touch; an illusion of hope which death vanquished. She died at Bergen-Belsen. It had always been thought that she and her sister Margot may have died mere weeks before liberation. New research, however, claims that not to have been the case. While Bergen-Belsen was liberated on April 15, 1945, and Anne had evidently perished from typhus in February.

Perhaps when she died the sky was blue, but one doubts the birds were singing.

The Islamic State Is Coming

"We all know that if they come, they will slit our throats for no reason."
Qaa, Lebanon, Christian villager

This Wednesday, Aug. 13, 2014 photo, shows a general view of Lebanon's Ras Baalbek, a Christian town in the northern Bekaa region near the border with Syria. (AP Photo/Bilal Hussein)

Well, the poor man is wrong; there is a reason. The Sunni extremist Islamic State views Christians as wasted on life; as non-Muslims they have no right to life and ISIS jihadis are eager to obligingly remove them from the lifestream of existence. The small Lebanese Christian village on the border of Syria is on tenterhooks; all the men carry with them automatic rifles to take up positions and lay in ambush just in case ...

Lebanese Christians have watched with dread and foreboding as other Christians are forced to flee the Islamic jihadis in Syria and neighbouring Iraq, knowing their turn is not long into the future. A border town was overrun by Islamic State mujahadeen a month ago to clash with security forces in a conflict that took place over a period of days where the IS jihadis killed and kidnapped Lebanese soldiers and police.

These Christian villagers are not strangers to sectarian violence. But since the end of the Lebanese civil war in 1990 they must have felt they had reason to hope that their ancestral homeland where their heritage of Christianity represents some of the most ancient such settlements in the world, would remain a safe haven for them and theirs. Now they are being forced to re-arm and set up self-defence units for protection.

Christian communities across the breadth of the Middle East as ancient as the religion itself, now know how at-risk their communities and their lives are, under threat of the Islamic State in its deadly rampages across Iraq and Syria. Tens of thousands of Christians, faced with the choice of converting to Islam or facing death, chose to flee their ancient homeland.

Now, Iraq's Ninevah region and the provincial capital of Mosul are empty of Christians. The Islamic State jihadis spray-painted their homes with the letter "N" representing the archaic word "Nasrani", referring to Christians, thus marking the houses as property of the Islamic State. Who is there who will argue with them for possession? During its three-year conflict Syria has seen thousands of its Christians displaced as they have come under jihadist attack.

Lebanon's Christian village of Ras Baalbek: Villagers are arming themselves for the first time since 1990 because they fear Isis will continue their rampage and cross the border from Syria to launch sectarian attacks   Bilal Hussein/The Associated Press

The rampages have destroyed churches and icons in one town after another In the militant stronghold of Raqqa, Christians were forced to pay an Islamic tax for protection, another quaint custom of Islam which dictates that the correct manner in which to dispose of non-Muslim unbelievers was to kill them, tax them, or banish them. Now, Christians originally from Iraq and Syria are finding shelter n Lebanon, a historically pluralistic country with the largest number of Christians left in the Middle East.

Fear is rampant, despite that Lebanon is the sole Arab country with a Christian head of state. A video, however, was posted online of boys burning an Islamic State flag in a Christian neighbourhood of Beirut, after which vandals spray-painted the walls of several churches with the menacing words: "The Islamic State is coming."

The sale of weapons has climbed exponentially on the black market. Shiite militia groups like Hezbollah approve of this rearming by the Christians; they view the Christian communities as the first line of defence for Shiite towns and villages in the Bekaa Valley region certain at some point to come under attack by the Sunni Islamic State jihadists.

Small Christian units have been fighting with the People's Protection Unit in Syria, a Kurdish militia. With the knowledge, however, that the numbers of Christians are limited enough to have little impact since they haven't the numbers, arms, or combat training to render them effective in countering the battle-hardened Islamist jihadis.

Iraq was once home to a million Christians before the U.S.-led invasion in 2003, removing the authority of Saddam Hussein, who had traditionally given protection to Christians. Since that time, Christians have been targeted by both the Shiite and Sunni extremists who view them as aliens to a country where their religion's presence far predated that of the Muslims. Even while the Shia and Sunni population violated each other's human rights, they preyed on the Christian Iraqis as well.

Since that time, their churches have been bombed, their clergymen killed, and Christians have been steadily harassed and made to fear for their lives. Church officials now place the community number at less than one-half of their former presence. And as events continue to play out in the Middle East, their numbers will continue to decrease, until they become as scarce in presence as that of Jews, who also once proliferated throughout the Middle East.

A Tragic Monstrosity

"While I'm professionally and personally against the capital punishment, this is indeed one of the rarest of the rare cases where the perpetrators deserve the death sentence."
"The sisters' modus operandi was using small children, often toddlers, as diversions to distract the public while one of them was engaged in stealing purses. When in danger of being caught, the other used to throw or bang the child to the ground or any hard surface."
"The object was to elicit sympathy by manipulating the public's emotions."
"In one of their particularly gruesome murders, they hung a two-year-old upside down, bashed his head against the wall and chopped him to pieces. They then went for a movie at a local theatre in Kolhapur, eating bhel puri [a savoury snack].
"All the while, the bag with the chopped remains remained under their feet."
Asim Sarode, human rights lawyer, activist, India

A police officer outside the high court in Mumbai, where the women have launched an appeal. Photograph: Punit Paranjpe/AFP/Getty Images

"Going into the details of the case, we find no mitigating circumstances against them apart from the fact they are women. Further, the nature of their crime and the systematic way in which each child was kidnapped and killed amply demonstrates the depravity of the mind of the appellants"
"They indulged in criminal activities for a very long period and continued till they were caught by the police. They very cleverly executed plans of kidnapping the children, and the moment they were no longer useful, killed them and threw the dead body at some deserted place."
Indian appeal court

HandoutSeema Mohan Gavit and Renuka Kiran Shinde, two sisters from Maharashtra may become the first to be executed in India. Both the sisters kidnapped children and pushed them into begging and killed them when they became troublesome.

The two sisters, Seema Gavit, and Renuka Shinde, are from Maharashtra state in India. Their crime-and-abduction-and-killing spree went on for five years -- beginning in 1991-- when they were thought to have kidnapped a total of thirteen children. Even the two women's mother was involved in the gruesome tale of depravity. And perhaps that she was involved gives a clue to the disposition of her daughters, where the lives they took seemed unimportant, the children disposable, used in their schemes of petty street crime.

The women's last victim was a choice that brought them finally to the attention of police when the mother of the abducted child suspected that her child had been taken by her husband's former wife. The former wife, mother of the two young women, held a virulent grudge against her former husband who had abandoned her and their two girls, the sisters Seema and Renuka. He remarried and then had other children with his new wife. His bitter wife planned her revenge and was aided by her daughters.

Shinde and Gavit helped their mother kidnap their father's nine-year-old daughter Kranti. The girl was then killed by their mother, the child's body left in a field. The little girl's mother suspected what had happened and spoke to police, informing them of her suspicions regarding her husband's ex-wife. They were all charged, arrested and placed on trial where in sentencing the sisters Judge G.L. Yedke spoke of the "most heinous" murders, observing that the women appeared to have enjoyed killing the children.

As far as the authorities were concerned, the sisters would remain a menace to society, unlikely to be reformed. They were charged with thirteen kidnappings and ten murders. Found guilty of five killings, they denied the charges against them. But they were convicted in 2001, and sentenced to death. Speaking on their behalf, their lawyer claimed they were wrongly convicted on the evidence of Shinde's husband. He had initially confessed to being involved, later changing his story and was permitted to give evidence against them in return for immunity.

Gavit was only 15 when she killed the first child; her older sister 17. Their mother Anjana, had introduced them to a life of crime. They were taught by their mother how to pick pockets in crowded marketplaces. During religious festivals in small towns throughout Maharashtra, western India, they would appear to take advantage of the festive distractions to take peoples' attention, and in those crowded atmospheres they plied their trade. 

Their first victim had been a one-year-old boy they took from a beggar woman. If, during their commissions of theft, the children were caught, one of them would slam the child who with them to the ground. After a number of these encounters, the child would be so battered, it would not stop crying. Anjana killed the boy by bashing his head against an iron rod. She herself died in prison before she could be tried, at age 50.

They had taught some of the older children they'd kidnapped to pick pockets. When they felt the children had become too much of a problem, they murdered the children who were at their mercy. The trouble was there was no mercy, no compassion in their sensibilities for the vulnerable children whose lives they took. Now, both women are to become the first in India to face execution, after the country's president rejected their final appeal for mercy.

India six-year-old 'raped in Bangalore school by staff members' 

BBC News online -- 17 July 2014

This is the latest in a series of sexual assault cases that have made headlines in India

A six-year-old schoolgirl has allegedly been raped by two staff members at a prominent school in the southern Indian city of Bangalore, police say.

The alleged assault happened on 2 July but her parents discovered it only a few days ago after she complained of stomach ache and was taken to hospital.

Meanwhile, hundreds of parents have protested outside the school, pulling down its gates and shouting slogans.
Police have registered a case, but they are yet to make any arrests.

The BBC's Andrew North in Delhi says it's the latest in a series of sexual assault cases that have made headlines in India.

Figures show more rapes are being reported in general, which is a sign that the crime is being taken more seriously, our correspondent reports. But India's sluggish judicial system means it can take years for victims to get justice.

New Prime Minister Narendra Modi has promised a zero tolerance approach on crimes against women, but violence and discrimination against women remain deeply entrenched in society.

The girl was allegedly raped by a security guard and a gym teacher, but as there are multiple guards and gym instructors in the school, police say they are trying to identify the guilty, BBC Hindi's Imran Qureshi reports from Bangalore.

As news of the incident became public, hundreds of parents gathered outside the school, protesting against the alleged insensitivity of the school management.

"They have handled it very shoddily," said Vivek Sharma, parent of a boy studying in the school.
On Thursday, school chairman Rustom Kerawala addressed a meeting of the parents where he offered his "sincere apologies" and promised "full co-operation" with the police investigation.

Scrutiny of sexual violence in India has grown since the 2012 gang rape and murder of a student on a Delhi bus.

The brutal crime led to massive outrage in the country and forced the government to introduce tougher anti-rape laws, including the death penalty in rare cases.

But the law appears to have failed to act as a deterrent. Statistics from the National Crime Records Bureau for 2013 show one rape was reported every 21 minutes.

Paul's Girl

There live among us people who have, by their despicably horrible actions forfeited the right to live. But as a humane society Canada disciplines killers with society's displeasure by incarceration, not capital punishment, even if those who are charged with multiple murders well planned and deviously executed, throwing in torture for good measure, are tried by jury and sentenced by judge to life imprisonment.

Life imprisonment in Canada is no longer than 25 years. And the criminal murderer is free after serving a major portion of his/her sentence to go before a parole board and plead good prison behaviour, meriting early release. Unless the murderers represent a pair, a man and woman, married to one another, and one of them agreed to surrender all she knows about the man she charges is the real culprit, her husband, in exchange for lighter punishment.

CBC Fifth Estate - aired March 1, 2006 - Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka . Photo credit : CBC Fifth Estate

Even if this woman, as much a sexual sadist as her husband, aided him in drugging and raping her own younger sister. A young woman who died after being raped by her sister's husband, drowning in her own vomit.

The above describes two young people who recognized in one another a morbid attraction to sexual sadism, and who ventured out in their greater Toronto neighbourhood and beyond to abduct first one then another young teen-age school girl, each to be kept bound and hidden, repeatedly raped, the rapes videorecorded for future delectation. Preceding these vicious predations, rapes without abductions had been occurring, alarming the city.

Karla Homolka and Paul Bernardo murdered Homolka’s sister Tammy Homolka as well as Leslie Mahaffy and Kristen French. Credit: Handout

But it was the brutality meted out to these two young girls, 14-year-old Leslie Mahaffy of Burlington, Ontario and Kristen French, 15, of St.Catharines, Ontario, and the dreadful manner of their deaths in 1991 and 1992 that horrified the country. Their murderers, Karla Homolka and Paul Bernardo, were finally taken into custody, charged with serial murder, and found guilty of those crimes unspeakably inhuman in the nature of their disgusting brutality.

Crimes that simply seemed not to upset their psychic equilibrium one whit. Karla Homolka served 12 years in prison for her crimes, a shortened sentence given her to reflect her willingness to become a Crown witness. She ultimately married her prison lawyer's brother, moved with him to Guadeloupe, and gave birth to three children. Responsible for the reprehensible humiliation and death of two young girls, this monster lives on to enjoy a 'normal' life.

Her former husband, Paul Bernardo, is also on the cusp of marrying. He will doubtless remain incarcerated for the length of his sentence, and possibly if prison psychiatrists consider him an ongoing risk at that point, it's possible he might not be released when his prison time has expired, but doubtful. In the interim, should he indeed marry the 30 year old woman described by a newspaper which has written of the matter as university-educated; "brilliant but troubled", he will be permitted conjugal visits.

His wife-to-be, a 30-year-old living in London, Ontario, carried on a correspondence with this disgusting parody of a human being for three months. During that time she came to the conclusion that he is a kind, Christian man entirely innocent of the crimes which have been attributed to him, irrespective of the evidence and the horrified public opprobrium, let alone the sentence Canadian justice meted out to him.

This misguided, delusional young woman now wears an ankle tattoo reading "Paul's girl".

"What's It To You?"

It's no big deal to a lot of authorities in India for whom the commonplace rape of vulnerable women and girls, occasionally resulting in their violent deaths along with their violation, represents society doing its thing as usual. After the abduction and rape of two young cousins, 14 and 15 years of age, from a field nearby their home where they had gone to relieve themselves, and the horrified villagers comprised of Dalits "untouchables" found the girls hanging from a tree, India faces global condemnation.

Members of Jawaharlal Nehru University Students Union shout slogans as they participate in a protest against a gang rape of two teenage girls in Katra village, outside the Uttar Pradesh state house, in New Delhi, India, Friday, May 30, 2014. A top government official said the northern Uttar Pradesh state has sacked two police officers who failed to respond to a complaint by the father of the two teenage girls who went missing and were later found gang raped and killed. (AP Photo/Manish Swarup)

The incidence of rape, gang rape, torture and murders of women and girls who are mired in poverty and vulnerable to upper-caste male predation for whom it has become customary to prey on Dalit females highlights the dismal human rights situation in this country of 1.2-billion people of mixed culture, heritage, religion, language and ethnicity. But it is among Hindus that the caste system is an integrated part of both religion and culture.

When journalists had gathered asking questions about the attack and the response to it, they were mocked by Uttar Pradesh state's chief minister, Akhilesh Yadav, a member of the high-caste Yadav from among whom came the rapist-murderers of the two young girls. "Aren't you safe? You're not facing any danger are you?", he challenged them. "Then why are you worried? What's it to you?"

It was a great deal to them, since it was the top-ranking story on India's 24-hour news stations. To inspire some with its sordid details, and to horrify many others who deplore the atrocities taking place against defenceless girls and women. In the very same state in the past few days the mother of a 17-year-old rape victim gang-raped by four men was herself brutally attacked.

The father, a brother and a cousin of a man accused in the rape, along with two other men followed the mother as she left her house and beat her pitilessly, with the demand that she drop the accusation. She is in critical condition in hospital. Little wonder many vicious attacks are not reported, since women are prevailed upon by family or police to remain silent.

Mayawati, former Uttar Pradesh chief minister spoke furiously against the ruling government: "There is no law and order in the state. It is the law of the jungle." In response, hours afterwards, the chief minister ordered the suspects be tried in "fast track" courts, bypassing India's notoriously laggardly justice system.

In the rape, strangulation and hanging of the two young girls from the village of Katra, officers arrested two additional police and two men from the village, and are actively searching out three other suspects. Earlier two local police officers had been suspended for ignoring the girls' relatives pleas for help. They were fired on Friday, charged with criminal conspiracy for refusing to take action..

The World's Greatest Democracy

The cousins, two girls of the ages of 14 and 15, had no facilities in their homes where they or any other family members could perform the most ordinary of human functions; voiding their bladders, emptying their bowels, something most people are accustomed to performing in privacy, in their own home bathrooms equipped with toilets to carry the waste away. But they, like around fifty percent of people living in India, have no such facilities.

They must evacuate their bodily-waste products in public, and they do, for they have little other choice. People go out from their homes and take themselves into empty fields or railway tracks or any other relatively close outdoor space, and they perform their daily evacuation. And it is there, where they are most vulnerable, that girls and women are violated. Not just any girls and woman, but mostly those of the 'untouchable' class.

The Hindu caste system holds that there are the privileged, of high caste, and the untouchables, the low caste people who are considered little better than slaves at the disposal of the high castes. And so, their human rights are largely non-existent. They are preyed upon in this most vulgar and unjust of social-religious-cultural systems that victimizes them, even though in India this is now against the law. It is also against the law to force girl children into marriage, but it is also customary.

The two cousins will never have to worry now about being forced into marriage with an elderly cousin or a wealthy old widower. They were abducted in full sight of other villagers similarly occupied in a field close to their home in Badaun in Utter Pradesh state. When the father of one of the girls went to the local police station, he was turned away. When he went to the home of one of the men whom he knew had abducted the girls, he was refused his demand for their release.

BBC News

All this with imperious impunity, with the serenity of entitlement. The girls were raped, they were strangled, they were hanged from branches of a tree for the entire community to see that this could happen to any one of them, for they were lowly Dalit. In India, many upper caste men believe implicitly it is their right to have "first choice" of any Dalit girl.

BBC News

"Rape is loss of our reputation, livelihood, honour and the end of our future" said one woman whose 14-year-old daughter with three of her friends were seized by five relations and neighbours of their feudal landlord. The girls had been drugged and raped throughout the night before they were finally released to their families. This, a family with five children who farm rice and barley fields with no income to show for it, to service a generational debt they could never pay off to a high-caste family.

The murdered cousins were seen being led away by local high-caste farmers, by their uncle. When the uncle attempted to intervene, he was warned off, with a gun. One of the girls' father said the police had "refused to look for my girl". Had his pleas been answered by a search -- since they knew very well where the girls were taken, having confronted one of the abductors who admitted the girls were with him, but refused to release them -- the girls' lives would have been saved.

"If my daughter doesn't get married and suffers her entire life, wouldn't it have been better for her that she had been killed by those beasts?" said the mother of the young girl who had been raped along with her three friends. It is impossible to imagine the lifelong trauma suffered by these children. The mother feared as well, with the tarnishing of the family honour, that her older daughter too would now be unmarriageable.

The entire family was forced to flee their village after death threats from the upper caste Hindus who had banned them from sending their children to school, from visiting the local temple, or from buying food from the shops. They migrated, along with 80 others from their village to Delhi, where they live in unspeakable privation, on the streets.

Holocaust Archaeology: Yahad-In Unum

"The purpose of my organization Yahad-In Unum (Hebrew "together"; Latin "One") is to look for the victims. We are not looking for the killers; we are looking for the victims."
"In many genocides, we only remember the names of the killers. The Jews have given sanctity to the names of the victims so that we remember them."
"We are now 23 full-time in my organization. I'm not alone now. All are younger than me."
"My goal is to give back to the families so they can pray and say Kaddish on the mass graves. The second goal is to give back the Jewish victims to the Jewish people. The third one is to fight the Holocaust deniers."
"We are investigating the crimes of Hitler against the Jews ... [and] we have interviewed 3,800 neighbours who were present at the killings. They could look through the window. They were not collaborators. They were teenagers who ... saw everything."
"They are now old and they want to speak before they die. For the majority of them, it is the first time they speak. We have recorded all of them and it is accessible through our website."
"I want to say to the young people, perhaps one day you will be a doctor, perhaps you will be a soldier or a journalist, and you will be in a country of genocide. You must take a photo and send it to CNN or somewhere, and that's the way you will protect humanity ... There is a Russian proverb in all these countries that says the work is over when the last victim is buried. If we don't do this, in future we will have no evidence of this crime."

 Father Patrick Desbois, head of Yahad-in Unum   http://www.yahadinunum.org

Father Patrick Desbois is a French Catholic priest. He has elected himself to bear witness to a mass atrocity, to remember and to find evidence, and to record and to memorialize. It is beyond human capacity to really understand what happened, why it happened, how it happened, that during World War II Nazi Germany strayed from the focus of world domination for the Third Reich, to perfect the world they envisioned by removing from it all traces of the presence of European Jewry as a start to eliminating Jews world-wide.

What is beyond human understanding is the capacity for some humans to demonstrate their capacity for mass slaughter, and to consider it a benefit to the world. To select an ancient people that persevered through countless millennia, to retain its faith and its cohesion as an ethnic group, with its distinct culture, heritage and religion, against all adversities. And adversity was never in short supply throughout the history of the Jewish people. And nor, since the advent of the Holocaust and beyond is it now in short supply. Father Desbois has dedicated his efforts to the memory of those who perished.

The founding of Yahad-In Unum took place in 2004, a joint project between leaders of France's Catholic and Jewish communities as a measure to bring Jews and Catholics together for a common purpose in shared humanity. The major initiative of the organization is meant to investigate and identify sites of mass graves of Jews murdered by German Fascist mobile killing units, called the Einsatzgruppen. And to look for their remains in Ukraine, Russia, Belarus, Poland, Moldova and Romania.

The pathological viral mental derangement more commonly spoken of as anti-Semitism had long found fertile ground and a comfortable home in Europe. Hitler and his minions felt that Germans were too civilized, would be too squeamish about having death camps positioned on German soil, so most of those concentration, labour and death camps were located elsewhere throughout Europe, where pogroms were not uncommon, and where it was less likely that any protests would arise, should anyone find the institutionalized obliteration of a people morally offensive.

Through dedicated on-the-ground research, Yahad-In-Unum has discovered evidence of mass graves in "village after village", representing the work of the Einsatzgruppen, separating the local Jewish population from their non-Jewish counterparts and eliminating them, men, women and children, in well organized operations, and in calculated cold blood. Yahad-In-Unum has signed a contract with the American Jewish Committee to ensure that revealed sites would be respected, "the graves will be protected forever and not be desecrated".

Father Desbois wears many hats, besides his anti-racist historical-humanitarian one; he is director of the Episcopal Committee for Relations with Judaism, itself connected with the French Conference of Bishops. His grandfather was a French soldier, deported to the Nazi prison camp Rawa-Ruska during the Second World War. Father Desbois himself studied anti-Semitism at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, as well as undertaking the study of Jewish religion and culture with a leader of the Jewish community in France.

Father Desbois embarked on a trip to Ukraine in 2002 to see for himself where his grandfather had been imprisoned, and while there he planned to pay his respects at a memorial he was certain he would find there. When he arrived he discovered to his amazement that there was no evidence, no kind of commemoration to the one-and-a-quarter-million Jews whose lives had been destroyed in Ukraine and Belarus. And he resolved to rectify that blatant oversight in respect and honour for the victims of morbidly destructive racism.

After founding Yaham-In Unum, he set about collecting information revolving around the mass killings of Jews and Roma in east Europe between 1941 and 1944. With the help of translators, Father Desbois along with others conducts interviews with witnesses. And with the use of metal detectors, he and his team have succeeded in unearthing German cartridges and bullets from pits where the bodies of the slaughtered were discarded, along with jewellery belonging to the victims, and other artifacts.

He has written a book outlining the immensity of the project: The Holocaust by Bullets: A Priest's Journey to Uncover the Truth Behind the Murder of 1.5 Million Jews.

Tuesday March the 4th, Father Desbois has been awarded the Crif award "in recognition of his commitment to the truth"

Devil's Spawn / Innocent Offspring

"I wanted to abort. At first I refused to breastfeed him and was looking away when the doctors gave him to me. I didn't want to look him in the face, knowing where he came from."
"The third time I heard them raping her, it was during the night, and I told myself, 'This is death, I don't want to see my daughter dying, I have to go die somewhere else."
Egidie, Rwandan Tutsi

Egidie, far right, stands with daughter Diana and son Bertrand. Diana was five during Rwanda’s genocide and was raped in a building next to where her mother was being raped. Egidie and Diana were separated for months and when they finally were reunited, Egidie was pregnant with Bertrand — whose father was one of the many men who raped his mother. The family is healing from their trauma through therapy. Photo and story by Sue Montgomery

 

"I've always felt rejected by her and he rest of the family. And now she feels responsible for the problems I'm having, and I feel guilty about that."
Angelique Uwasa, 19

Angelique Uwasa, 19, (centre) was born to Chantal Mukeshimana, who was raped during Rwanda's genocide in 1994. Both traumatized, they are trying to heal their troubled relationship which is rife with resentment.  Photograph by: Sue Montgomery, The Gazette

 

"I was vomiting and when I realized I was pregnant, I wanted to kill myself."
Chantal Mukeshimana, Angelique's mother

Vestine Mukangamije (left) was raped by the man who killed her husband and five children during Rwanda's genocide. Poor, homeless and still traumatized by the horrors of 1994, she leans on other rape survivors, such as Chantal Mukeshimana. (right)

 

During the 100 days of the 1994 genocide that took place in Rwanda, despite the presence of United Nations Peacekeeping troops, unarmed and unable in their paucity of numbers to physically restrain the Hutus of Rwanda from attacking their fellow Tutsi Rwandans, almost a million men, women and children were slaughtered by their neighbours using crude implements to effect their murders.

The genocidaires -- as they are now called; Hutu men and boys of age -- slaughtered, pillaged and raped. Tutsi women, between 250,000 and 500,000 of them, according to Amnesty International, were serially raped throughout the months of viciously frenzied killing. The aim of the majority ruling Hutu was to destroy the presence of the minority Tutsi.

An estimated 20,000 children were born of the mass rapes. These were children who understood themselves to be different by the way in which they were viewed by their mothers, by their families; branded with shame, dreaded by both ethnic communities as representing neither one nor the other. The children were living reminders of the horrors that were compelled upon them. Many thought of their children as representing "fruit of the devil".

In the southern town of Butare, a woman named Egidie was raped during the horrors of the genocide. Her daughter, all of five years of age at the time, was kept imprisoned in another building. And the child was raped repeatedly, the mother able to hear the voice of her little girl screaming in agony and pain and fear that would not stop. Months afterward, Egidie was able to see her child again, when both survived their dreadful ordeals.

The little girl could barely manage to walk, as a result of the internal injuries done her. And that's when Egidie realized she was pregnant. Her son Bertrand, has just turned 19. Donor funding allowed for widows of the genocide to live in neat rows of houses along Rwanda's terraced slopes. Hundreds of thousands of women survived, their husbands having been butchered. They helped to raise the children of others and shared what they could.

"In the past I felt rejected and unwanted", explains Bertrand, 6-feet tall. "But my mother hadn't explained to me what happened. Now I'm trying to move on, help my mom and leave the past." If that is at all possible. Diane, the five-year-old, now is in her third year of development studies at university. She hates men. But not her father. "My father loved us, especially me", she says, smiling.

As for Angelique Uwasa, whose mother was savagely gang-raped repeatedly, the memory of which has almost destroyed her, the mother and daughter are attending meetings arranged through a local NGO, Best Hope Rwanda. At the meeting, Angelique and her mother were among dozens of other women raped during the genocide, along with their offspring of those atrocities. They are all doing their best to find hope in life, to tamp down the bitter gall of memory.

These are women and their children who live in a country where those who considered them to be enemies, less human than themselves and deserving to die horrible deaths, now live among them as they did before the madness erupted. That, in and of itself, forcing accommodation with the fact that neighbours took part in such monstrous atrocities as mass murder, rape of children and women, is bitter fruit to taint the future.